Other pages tagged with "Andrew Elfenbein"http://www.rc.umd.edu/taxonomy/term/18677/all
en1994 NASSR Conferencehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/confarchive/nassr94_new.html
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div class="c1"> </div>
<div class="c1">
</div>
<div class="c1">
<h2>NASSR Annual Convention 1994</h2>
</div>
<div class="c1">
<h2>The Political and Aesthetic Education of Romanticism</h2>
</div>
<div class="c1">
<h3>10-13 November 1994</h3>
</div>
<div class="c1">
<h3>Duke University, Durham, North Carolina</h3>
</div>
<div class="c1">Conference Organizers: Robert F. Gleckner &amp; Thomas Pfau, Duke University</div>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><a name="Thursday" id="Thursday"> </a>Thursday, November 10</p>
<p><strong>10:00-11:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Uneducated Poets" (special session organized by Alan Richardson, Boston C)</strong><br/>
"The Untutored Muse" <em>(Alan Richardson)</em><br/>
"'Children o' the Soil': Peasant Poetry and Organic Nationalism" <em>(Scott McEathron, U of Southern Illinois)</em><br/>
"Romantic Ideology and the 'Natural Genius': Women Poets, Anthologies, and the Production of Poetic History in the 1790s" <em>(Laura Mandell, Miami U)</em><br/>
"No Advantages of Education: John Clare's Vulgarity of Language" <em>(James McKusick, U of Maryland Baltimore County)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Schiller: Aesthetics and Politics" (Chair: Michael Morton, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Aesthetics and Politics from Benjamin to Schiller:&#160; Rethinking the Aesthetic State" <em>(Jonathan M. Hess, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)</em><br/>
"Romanticism, <em>Bildung</em>, and the 'Literary Absolute'" <em>(Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate School)</em><br/>
"Schiller's Political Aesthetics: The Refinement of Liberal Democratic Man" <em>(Michael Valdez Moses, Duke U)</em><br/>
"The Critique of Aesthetic Ideology: Radical Democracy and Friedrich Schiller's <em>On the Aesthetic Education of Man</em>" <em>(Jacqueline LeBlanc, U of Massachussetts)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romanticism and the Homoerotic" (Chair: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"'My very touch were to be infectious': Godwin's <em>Caleb Williams</em> and Homoerotic Panic" <em>(Ranita Chatterjee, U of Western Ontario)</em><br/>
"Byron's Homo-Narcissism: or 'Heathcliff, I <em>am</em> Nellie'" <em>(Steven Bruhm, Mount St. Vincent U)</em><br/>
"Sexual Pedagogies and the Lesbian Body in 'Christabel'" <em>(Andrew Elfenbein, U of Minnesota)</em><br/>
"Sappho, Sexuality, and the Romantic Sublime" <em>(Sharon Setzer, North Carolina State U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Sexual and Political Instruction in the Work of Mary Shelley" (Chair: Jeanne Moskal, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)</strong><br/>
"Learning to Curse: Translation, Rape, and Instruction in Mary Shelley's <em>Proserpine</em>" <em>(Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern U)</em><br/>
"Women and Education in Mary Shelley's <em>Lodore</em>" <em>(Ann M. Frank Wake, Elmhurst College)</em><br/>
"Ghostly Pedagogies: Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and the Writing of Poetic Identity" <em>(Ghislaine McDayter, Duke U)</em><br/>
"'The god undeified': <em>Valperga</em> and the Education of Romantic Subjects" <em>(Daniel E. White, U of Pennsylvania)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>1:15-3:00</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Scenes of Instruction in Blake" (Chair: Paul Yoder, U of Arkansas-Little Rock)</strong><br/>
"Blake's <em>Songs</em>: Of Instruction and Its Experience" <em>(Nelson Hilton, U of Georgia-Athens)</em><br/>
"(Con)(In)structing Albion: Blake, Gender, and Politics: 1792-95" <em>(Catherine McClenahan, U of St. Thomas)</em><br/>
"Righting Albion: Blake's Canon Revision" <em>(Paul Yoder)</em><br/>
"Late Kant, Middle Blake: Toward a Theory of Blake's Political Education" <em>(Steven Goldsmith, U of California-Berkeley)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Darstellung and the Lessons of Post-Structuralism" (Chair: James Rolleston, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"The Crisis of Representation in Romanticism: Romantic <em>Darstellung</em> and Poststructuralist Critical Theory" <em>(Irena Nikolova, U of Western Ontario)</em><br/>
"Postfacing the Preface in Coleridge" <em>(Sophie Thomas, Oxford U)</em><br/>
"Rhetorical Pragmatism: Jeremy Bentham and the Predictability of Fiction" <em>(Peter Roman Babiak, York U)</em><br/>
"The Romantic Object of Beauty and the Suppression of Art" <em>(Laura Claridge, US Naval Academy)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Victorian Receptions of Romanticism" (Chair: Clyde de L. Ryals, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"'Useful herbs to take the place of weeds': The Politics of Wordsworth's Victorian Reception" <em>(Gary Harrison, U of New Mexico)</em><br/>
"Feminizing Romanticism: Tennyson's Embowered Maidens and Morbid Poets" <em>(Alice Fasano, New York U)</em><br/>
"Romanticism Theorized: <em>Sartor Resartus</em> Revisited" <em>(Nigel Alderman, Duke U)</em><br/>
"Suffering Meter: Swinburne and the Sapphic Scene of Instruction" <em>(Yopie Prins, U of Michigan)</em></p>
<p><strong>"The Education of John Keats" (Chair: Marilyn Gaull, New York U)</strong><br/>
"'A Cockney Schoolroom': Keats and the Modern Academy" <em>(Nicholas Roe, U of St. Andrews)</em><br/>
"Keats in the Cockney School: An Aesthetic and Political Education" <em>(Jeffrey Cox, Texas A &amp; M)</em><br/>
"Aesthetic Education in the Public Sphere: Haydon, Hazlitt, and Keats's Elgin Marbles Sonnets" <em>(John Kandl, New York U)</em><br/>
"Romanticism and the Education of Psychoanalysis: Keats and (<em>The Fall of</em>) <em>Hyperion</em>" <em>(Joel Faflak, U of Western Ontario)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>3:30-5:30</strong> FIRST PLENARY DISCUSSION</p>
<p>Welcome: Robert F. Gleckner &amp; Thomas Pfau (Duke U)</p>
<p>"Designing the World Picture" Jerome Christensen (English, Johns Hopkins U)</p>
<p>"Gendering the Soul," Susan Wolfson (English, Princeton U)</p>
<p>Respondent: Peter J. Manning (U of Southern California)</p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><a name="Friday" id="Friday"> </a>Friday, November 11</p>
<p><strong>8:45-10:30</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Coleridge and the Political Education of Criticism" (special session organized by James McKusick, U of Maryland-Baltimore County)</strong><br/>
"Transitions: The 'Logic' of the 'Wildest Odes'" <em>(Heather J. Jackson, U of Toronto)</em><br/>
"<em>Friend</em>ly Instruction: Coleridge and the Configuration of Social Knowledge" <em>(Regina Hewitt, U of South Florida)</em><br/>
"The Genius of Failure, the Masquerade of Fame: Coleridge's Sociology of Literature in the <em>Biographia Literaria</em>" <em>(Adrienne Donald, Princeton U)</em><br/>
"Coleridge's Unfinished Aesthetic Education: Coleridge, Schiller on Culture and the State" <em>(David Aram Kaiser, U of Kentucky)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romanticism, Education, and the History of Science" (special session organized by James K. Chandler, U of Chicago)</strong><br/>
"Knowing Nature: Science, Romanticism, and the Empire of the External World" <em>(Laura Doyle, Harvard U)</em><br/>
"Coleridge, Shelley, and Science's Millennium" <em>(Mark Kipperman, Northern Illinois U)</em><br/>
"The Body which Speaks to the Body: Pedagogies of Human Influence in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" <em>(Alison Winter, California Institute of Technology)</em><br/>
"<em>Frankenstein</em>: Specifying the Limits of Pedagogy" <em>(Maureen McLane, U of Chicago)</em></p>
<p><strong>"British Romantic Fiction: Gender and History" (Chair: Susan Thorne, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Courting Ruin: The Economic Romances of Frances Burney" <em>(Miranda Burgess, Boston U)</em><br/>
"Falling into Quotation: <em>Persuasion</em> and the Fall of Woman" <em>(John Morillo, North Carolina State U)</em><br/>
"Historical Fiction as Pedagogy: Scott's Travelling Education and an Approach to Romantic Historicism in the Novel" <em>(Richard Maxwell, Valparaiso U)</em><br/>
"Scott's Authorised Version: From Waverley Romance to <em>Magnum Opus</em> Historical Truth" <em>(Clare Simmons, Ohio State U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Was (or is) There an Identity We Can Call 'Romanticism'?" I (a special session organized by Jerrold E. Hogle, U of Arizona)</strong><br/>
Introduction: "The Question of One 'Romanticism.'" (J. Hogle)<br/>
"Romantic Identity and the Community of Sentiment" <em>(Stephen C. Behrendt, U of Nebraska-Lincoln)</em><br/>
"The 'Myth' of Romanticism and the Idea of Community" <em>(Celeste Langan, UC-Berkeley)</em><br/>
"I don't believe in Romanticism (The University does it for me)" <em>(John Rieder, U of Hawaii-Manoa)</em><br/>
Respondent: Marshall Brown (U of Washington)</p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>11:00-12:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Politics, Epistemology, and Rhetoric in Shelley" (Chair: Eric Walker, Florida State U)</strong><br/>
"Tutelary Bureaucracies: Compelling the Civic Conscience in <em>Prometheus Unbound</em> and <em>The Cenci</em>" <em>(Michael Kohler, Johns Hopkins U)</em><br/>
"Unteachable Learning: On the Parting of Poetry and Madness in Shelley's <em>Julian and Maddalo</em>" <em>(Silke-Maria Weineck, U of Pennsylvania)</em><br/>
"Art, Nature, and Analogical Inference in Shelley's 'Mont Blanc'" <em>(Michael Vicario, Penn State U)</em><br/>
"The Empress's New Mind: Shelley's <em>The Witch of Atlas</em> as the Scene of Instruction" <em>(Arkady Plotnitsky, U of Pennsylvania)</em></p>
<p><strong>"The Romantic Body: Between Sustenance and Pathology" (Chair: Anne K. Mellor, UCLA)</strong><br/>
"The Nurse's Tale: The Fostering System as National and Imperial Education" <em>(Katie Trumpener, U of Chicago)</em><br/>
"Educating Mothers to be Mothers: Romanticism and the Maternal Breastfeeding Controversy" <em>(Julie Costello, U of Notre Dame)</em><br/>
"John Brown's Medical Romanticism" <em>(Martin Wallen, U of Oklahoma)</em><br/>
"Confessing the Body: Lamb on Drunkenness, Hazlitt on Sex" <em>(Bonnie Woodberg, Florida State U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Models of Aesthetic and Political Instruction in Godwin, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt" (Chair: Nicholas Roe, U of St. Andrews)</strong><br/>
"'Of Deception and Frankness': Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and the Jacobin Response to <em>Emile</em>" <em>(Gary Handwerk, U of Washington)</em><br/>
"The man, whose eye / Is ever on himself': The Ideological Function of Aesthetic Self- Surveillance in Bell, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth" <em>(Thomas Pfau, Duke U)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth and the Great Wheel of Education" <em>(Alison Hickey, Wellesley C)</em><br/>
"Interest and Imagination: Hazlitt's <em>Essay on the Principles of Human Action</em>" <em>(Deborah Elise White, Columbia U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Marketing Romantic Music: The Age of Lost Innocence" (special session organized by James Deaville, Music, McMaster U)</strong><br/>
"Creating a Musical Public and Constructing Musical Modernism: The New-German School and the Euterpe Concerts in Leipzig" <em>(James Deaville)</em><br/>
"Piano Arrangements in the Nineteenth Century: Marketing/Domesticating/Canonizing" <em>(James Parakilas, Bates C)</em><br/>
"Re-Educating the 'Classical' Public: "The Romantic Revival and the Contemporary American Musical Scene" <em>(Michael Saffle, Virginia Tech. U)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>2:00-3:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Was (or is) There an Identity We Can Call 'Romanticism'?" II (special session organized by Jerrold E. Hogle, U of Arizona)</strong><br/>
"Introduction: The Defence of Romanticism" <em>(Jerrold Hogle)</em><br/>
"What Happens When Jane Austen and Fanny Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?" <em>(William Galperin, Rutgers U)</em><br/>
"Romanticism, Coleridge, and the Hermeneutics of the Ethical Sublime" <em>(David Haney, Auburn U)</em><br/>
"The Survival of Romanticism: Poets and Poetics Since the Early Nineteenth Century" <em>(Jeffrey Robinson, U of Colorado-Boulder)</em><br/>
Respondent: Jean Hall (Cal. State U--Fullerton)</p>
<p><strong>"Educating the Eye: Visual Arts and Exhibitions" (Chair: John L. Sharpe, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Teaching Discipline: Sketching and Drawing Manuals in British Romanticism" <em>(Richard Sha, American U)</em><br/>
"Blake and the Aesthetics of the Sketch" <em>(Joseph Viscomi, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)</em><br/>
"Aesthetic Education in Blake's Illustrations to Young's <em>Night Thoughts</em>" <em>(Grant Scott, Muhlenberg C)</em><br/>
"Romantic Exhibition and the Rise of the Viewing Public"<em>(C. S. Matheson, U of Windsor)</em></p>
<p><strong>"The Contours of a Feminine Romanticism" (Chair: Stuart Curran, U of Pennsylvania)</strong><br/>
"Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth: 'Dark Forgetfulness' and 'The Intercession of Saint Monica'" <em>(Kari Lokke, U of California-Davis)</em><br/>
"An Education in Stereotypes: Hemans's 'Red Indians'" <em>(Nancy Moore Goslee, U of Tennessee-Knoxville)</em><br/>
"Anna Seward's Arcadian Voice: Finding a Place in Darwin's Botanical Garden" <em>(Elizabeth Fay, U of Massachusetts-Boston)</em><br/>
"Realizing a Romantic Pedagogy: Romantic Women Writers and the Romance of Real Life" <em>(Michael Gamer, U of Pennsylvania)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Irony, Individuality, and Aesthetic Strategy in German Romanticism" (Chair: Paul Cantor, U of Virginia)</strong><br/>
"The Politics of <em>Individualit&#228;t</em> in Schlegel, Novalis, and H&#246;lderlin" <em>(Gerald N. Izenberg, Washington U)</em><br/>
"Productive Rupture: the Discreet Irony of an Aesthetic Education in Kleist's <em>&#220;ber das Marionettentheater</em>" <em>(Anthony Reynolds, New York U)</em><br/>
"Reading the Book of Nature in E. T. A. Hoffmann" <em>(David Vandenberg, Emory &amp; Henry C)</em><br/>
"The Power of Music and/or the Power of Words" <em>(Ulrich Sch&#246;nherr, Columbia U)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>4:15-6:15</strong> SECOND PLENARY DISCUSSION</p>
<p>"The Inhibitions of Democracy in Romantic Political Thought: Thoreau's Democratic Individualism," Nancy Rosenblum (Political Science, Brown U)</p>
<p>"The Doubled Consciousness of Early Capitalist Culture," Steven Watts (History, U of Missouri-Columbia)</p>
<p>Respondents: Cathy Davidson (English, Duke U) &amp; Michael Gillespie (Political Science, Duke U)</p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><a name="Saturday" id="Saturday"> </a>Saturday, November 12</p>
<p><strong>8:45-10:30</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Aesthetic Valuation and Social Process: the Reviewers Reviewed" (Chair: John Kandl, New York U)</strong><br/>
"The Pedagogy of Enlightened, Radical, and Romantic Readers: An Example from John Thelwall" <em>(Michael Scrivener, Wayne State U)</em><br/>
"Making the Romantic Ideology: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the <em>Wat Tyler</em> Affair" <em>(Robert K. Lapp, Dalhousie U)</em><br/>
"Rape, Patricide, and Execution: A Play on Violence" <em>(Young-ok An, U of Southern California)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Language, Theory: Implicating the Political" (special session organized by Carol Jacobs, SUNY-Buffalo)</strong><br/>
"The 'End of Art' in Friedrich H&#246;lderlin's 'Stimme Des Volkes'" <em>(Eva Geulen, U of Rochester)</em><br/>
"The Sublime of the Nation and the German Question" <em>(Ian Balfour, York U)</em><br/>
"<em>Res publica</em>: Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Schlegel, and 'Political Romanticism'" <em>(Matthew Hartman, Johns Hopkins U)</em><br/>
"The Force of the Positive: The Hyperions of Keats and Marx" <em>(Tom McCall, U of Houston)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Women Poets and the Romantic Aesthetic" (special session organized by Stephen C. Behrendt, U of Nebraska-Lincoln and Harriet Kramer Linkin, New Mexico State U)</strong><br/>
"Women and Della Cruscanism, Women and Romanticism" <em>(Judith Pascoe, U of Iowa)</em><br/>
"The Merging of Public and Private: Charlotte Smith's <em>Beachy Head</em>" <em>(Kay Cook, Southern Utah U)</em><br/>
"Staging History: Catherine Macaulay, Joanna Baillie, and Felicia Hemans" <em>(Greg Kucich, U of Notre Dame)</em><br/>
"One Sings, the Other Doesn't: Letitia Landon and Mary Tighe, or How Women Poets Image the Romantic Aesthetic" <em>(Harriet Kramer Linkin)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Shakespeare and the Scene of Romantic Literary Instruction" (special session organized by Charles Mahoney, U of Connecticut-Storrs)</strong><br/>
"Savoyard Shakespeare: Wordsworth in the Hills of Paris" <em>(Reeve Parker, Cornell U)</em><br/>
"Master Betty Masters Shakespeare: Managing the Queer Character of Youth" <em>(Julie Carlson, U of California-Santa Barbara)</em><br/>
"Patrolling the Bard: Hazlitt, <em>Coriolanus</em>, and Romantic Apostasy" <em>(Charles Mahoney)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>11:00-12:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Music and Culture in French and German Romanticism" (special session organized by Jeffrey Kallberg, U of Pennsylvania)</strong><br/>
"Some Romantic Images in Beethoven" <em>(Maynard Solomon, New York)</em><br/>
"Practicing Music and the Practice of Sex : Sex and Music in French Romantic Discourse" <em>(Jeffrey Kallberg)</em><br/>
"Romantic Music under Siege in 1848" <em>(Sanna Pederson, U of Pennsylvania)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Education, Romantic Aesthetics, and the Denial of Rhetoric" (special session organized by David Ferris, Queens College &amp; CUNY Graduate Center)</strong><br/>
"Rhetoric and Denial on Keats's Urn" <em>(David Ferris)</em><br/>
"Poetic Education: Shelley's 'Defence' and the Crisis in Romanticism" <em>(Roger Blood, Yale U)</em><br/>
"Language and the 'Body Politic'" <em>(Claudia Brodsky-Lacour, Princeton U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"From Picturesque to the Sublime: The Cognitive Structure of the Romantic Image" (Chair: Annette Wheeler Cafarelli)</strong><br/>
"Jane Austen and the Picturesque: Aesthetic Instruction and Romantic Epistemology" <em>(Jill Heydt-Stevenson, U of Texas-San Antonio)</em><br/>
"The Lessons of <em>Imitatio Christi</em> and <em>Imitatio Naturae</em> in the Work of Caspar David Friedrich" <em>(Hillary A. Braysmith, U of Southern Indiana)</em><br/>
"The Political Aesthetic of Adam M&#252;ller and Caspar David Friedrich's Landscape Painting" <em>(Peter Foley, U of Arizona)</em><br/>
"'Sur les &#233;paules d'un pauvre esclave': Salvation, &#233;sperance, and Equality in G&#233;ricault's <em>Raft of Medusa</em>" <em>(Albert Alhadeff, U of Colorado-Boulder)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Pastoralism, Eroticism, Enlightenment, and Geometry in Wordsworth's <em>Prelude</em>" (Chair: Judith W. Page, Millsaps C)</strong><br/>
"Teaching the 'Art of Seeing': Pastoral Vestiges in Thomson and Wordsworth" <em>(Kevis Goodman, Yale U)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth's Nationalist Geometry" <em>(William Jewett, Yale U)</em><br/>
"Soldier Boys and Male Romantic Poets" <em>(James Holt McGavran, U of North Carolina-Charlotte)</em><br/>
"'The light of circumstances, flash'd / Upon an independent intellect': Education and Progression in <em>The Prelude</em>" <em>(David Garcia, Cornell U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Re-mapping Romanticism: Of Domestic and Oriental Subjects" (Chair: John Waters, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Reading Habits: Scenes of Miseducation in the Romantic Line" <em>(Marlon Ross, U of Michigan)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth's Aesthetic Appropriation of Nature: A Problematic Step Toward Eco- ideology" <em>(Martha Bohrer, Miami U)</em><br/>
"Eastern Non-Dualism and the Sublime in Late Eighteenth-Century English Poetry" <em>(Kathryn Freeman, U of Miami)</em><br/>
"Theory and History in Romantic Orientalism and Romantic Studies" <em>(Susan B. Taylor, U of Colorado-Colorado Springs)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>2:00-3:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Reverse Instruction: Romanticism and Postmodernism" (Chair: Timothy Morton, New York U)</strong><br/>
"Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley's <em>Defence</em> of Adorno" <em>(Robert Kaufman, U of California-Berkeley)</em><br/>
"Educating Postmodernism: or, Reading Backwards from Postmodern Fiction to John Clare" <em>(Theresa M. Kelley, U of Texas-Austin)</em><br/>
"Fantastic Modernity, Fantastic Reflexivities: Keats, Jameson, and the Postmodern Urn" <em>(Orrin Wang, U of Maryland at College Park)</em><br/>
"Imitating Silence: Byron, Hood, Poe, and Campion" <em>(Carol Jacobs, SUNY-Buffalo)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Politics and Ireland: The Edgeworths" (Chair: Nigel Alderman, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"The Edgeworths and the Interests of Education" <em>(Mark Canuel, Johns Hopkins U)</em><br/>
"Maria Edgeworth: Teacher and Critic" <em>(Francis Botkin, U of Illinois-Chicago)</em><br/>
"'His eyes upon us': The Lesson of the Informer in Edgeworth's 'Lame Jervas'" <em>(Julia M. Wright, Concordia, Montreal)</em><br/>
"'The Little Remnant': Alterity, Femininity, and the National Tale" <em>(Ina Ferris, U of Ottawa)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Uneducated Poets: Expanding the Canon" (Chair: Scott McEathron, U of Southern Illinois)</strong><br/>
"Theoretical Conditions of the Expansion of the Romantic Poetic Canon" <em>(John Waters, Duke U)</em><br/>
"Lubin's Literacy: John Clare and the Possibilities of the Peasant Poet" <em>(Bridget Keegan, Samford U)</em><br/>
"Patronage and the Peasant-Poet in the early Romantic Period: Theorizing the Beginnings of Ann Yearsley, Robert Bloomfield, and Felicia Hemans" <em>(Chad Edgar, New York U)</em><br/>
"The Ghosts of Competing Literacies in John Clare's <em>Autobiography</em>" <em>(Richard Swartz, U of Southern Maine)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Theorizing Romantic Drama" (Chair: Robert F. Gleckner, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Joanna Baillie's Poetic Aesthetic: Passion and 'the plain order of things'" <em>(Catherine Burroughs, Cornell C)</em><br/>
"Liberal Self-Fashioning in Shelley's <em>Cenci</em>" <em>(Linda Brigham, Kansas State U)</em><br/>
"Byron as a Teacher of the Barred Subject: <em>Manfred</em> and the Ethics of Desire" <em>(Sinkwan Cheng, State U of New York-Buffalo)</em></p>
<p><strong>"The Teachings of Nature in German Romanticism" (special session organized by Alice Kuzniar, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)</strong><br/>
"'<em>Voran leuchtest du.'</em> What Kepler Taught the Romantics About Nature" <em>(Nicholas Halmi, U of Toronto)</em><br/>
"Towards a Mystical Physics: An Aspect of Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of <em>Universalpoesie</em>" <em>(Paola Mayer, U of Toronto)</em><br/>
"On Being the 'Last Kantian in Nazi Germany': Dwelling with Animals after Schelling" <em>(David Clark, McMaster U)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>4:15-6:15</strong> THIRD PLENARY DISCUSSION</p>
<p>"The Interdisciplinary War Machine: Saluting French Revolution Studies," Alan Liu (English, UC-Santa Barbara)</p>
<p>Respondents: Cynthia Chase (English, Cornell U) &amp; William Reddy (Duke U)</p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><a name="Sunday" id="Sunday"> </a>Sunday, November 13</p>
<p><strong>8:45-10:30</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Teaching Violence in Romanticism" (special session organized by Mary A. Favret, Indiana U)</strong><br/>
"Teaching Byron's <em>Giaour</em> as Riddle and Message" <em>(Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, UCLA)</em><br/>
"'Rouzing the Faculties to Act': Blake's Scenes of (Violent) Instruction" <em>(Nicholas Williams, Indiana U)</em><br/>
"Learning What Hurts: 'The School-Mistress,' the Rod, and the Poem" <em>(Adela Pinch, U of Michigan)</em><br/>
"Radical Poetry 101: Wordsworth and Contemporary Lyrics of Resistance" <em>(Jonathan Barron, U of North Carolina-Charlotte)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romantic Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Academy" (Chair: Jerome McGann, U of Virginia)</strong><br/>
"Poetry and the Law: the Poet as Legislator in Shelley and Rousseau" <em>(Lorrie Clark, Trent U)</em><br/>
"The Political Economy of Aesthetic Consumption" <em>(Margaret Russett, U of Southern California)</em><br/>
"Shelley's Unhumanizing Pedagogy" <em>(Paul Youngquist, Pennsylvania State U)</em><br/>
"Genius School: Coleridge, Schiller, and the Productionist Aesthetic" <em>(Kathleen Dillon, Temple U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romantic Knowledge: Institutions of Production and Pedagogy" (Chair: Rhonda Ray Kercsmar)</strong><br/>
"Institutions of Romanticism: An International Perspective" <em>(Clifford Siskin, SUNY-Stony Brook, and Philip Martin, Cheltenham &amp; Gloucester College)</em><br/>
"Can We Teach Romanticism to an Unromantic Generation" <em>(Debbie Lee, U of Arizona)</em><br/>
"Between Irony and Radicalism: the Other Way of a Romantic Education" <em>(Karen Weisman, U of Waterloo)</em><br/>
"A Histrionic Romantics Classroom" <em>(Thomas Crochunis, Rutgers U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romanticism in Canada" (special session organized by Tilottama Rajan, U of Western Ontario)</strong><br/>
"Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill" <em>(Carole Gerson, Simon Fraser U)</em><br/>
"Made One with Nature: The Commemorative Odes of the Confederation Poets" <em>(D.M.R. Bentley, U of Western Ontario)</em><br/>
"Frye in Canada: Jonah in the Belly of the Whale" <em>(Ross Woodman, U of Western Ontario)</em><br/>
"European Romantic Nationalism, Colonial Nationalism, Canadian Literary Criticism" <em>(Margery Fee, U of British Columbia)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>11:00-12:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"New Romantic Canons in the Same Old Classroom: A Problem-Solving Forum on Teaching" (special session organized by Morris Eaves, U of Rochester)</strong><br/>
Position papers by Laura Mandell (Miami U), Anne K. Mellor (UCLA) &amp; Richard Matlak (C of the Holy Cross), Jerome McGann (U of Virginia), and Stuart Curran (U of Pennsylvania).</p>
<p><strong>"Teaching Wordsworth's Teachings" (Chair: William Galperin, Rutgers U)</strong><br/>
"Teaching a Sheep to Talk: The Spiritual Education of Romanticism" <em>(Walter Reed, Emory U)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth and the Problem of Authority in Feminist Pedagogy" <em>(Michael Fischer, U of New Mexico)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth's 'The Thorn' and the Social Imagination" <em>(Scott Harshbarger, Hofstra U)</em><br/>
"'Strange Discipline': Aesthetic Education and Community in Wordsworth's <em>The Ruined Cottage</em>" <em>(Kurt Fosso, Westminster C)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romantic Education as Social and Aesthetic Practice" (Chair: Richard Swartz, U of Southern Maine)</strong><br/>
"The Professionalization of Knowledge: Female Education in Middle Class Romantic Culture" <em>(Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Columbia U)</em><br/>
"Britain and the Culture of Disestablishment" <em>(Nanora Sweet, U of Missouri-St. Louis)</em><br/>
"State Education, Taste Education" <em>(Timothy Morton, New York U)</em><br/>
"Lessons of Radical Difference: Mary Shelley and the Politics of Family History" <em>(Deborah Weiner, U of Rochester)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Genres as Modes of Education" (special session organized by J. Douglas Kneale, U of Western Ontario)</strong><br/>
"Let nature be your teacher: Wordsworth and Poetical Correctness" <em>(Stephen Bretzius, Lousiana State U)</em><br/>
"The Rising Glory of America" <em>(Julie Ellison, U of Michigan)</em><br/>
"The Ambivalence of Romantic Identity: Harmony and Conflict in Self-Descriptions by Wordsworth and Byron" <em>(Jean Hall, California State U-Fullerton)</em><br/>
"Transport and Persuasion in Wordsworth" <em>(J. Douglas Kneale)</em></p>
<hr class="c4"/>
<p><strong>1:00-2:00</strong> NASSR BUSINESS MEETING</p>
<hr class="c4" width="70%"/>
<div class="c1"><a href="/reference/misc/confarchive/archiv.html">Conference Archive Main Page</a></div>
<hr/>
<p class="c5"><!--end of the breadcrumb trail--> <!--beginning of fine print and footer-->
<!--end fine print and footer--></p></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31537">Scholarly Resources</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/reference/misc/confarchive/index.html">Conference Archive</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/alan-richardson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alan Richardson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/laura-mandell" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Laura Mandell</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/steven-bruhm" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Steven Bruhm</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-galperin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Galperin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/michael-valdez-moses" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Valdez Moses</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/michael-morton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Morton</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/eve-kosofsky-sedgwick" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/anne-k-mellor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anne K. Mellor</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jacqueline-leblanc" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jacqueline LeBlanc</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jerrold-e-hogle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jerrold E. Hogle</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/friedrich-schiller" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Friedrich Schiller</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-clare" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Clare</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/nicholas-roe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nicholas Roe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/marc-redfield" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Marc Redfield</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/caleb-williams" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caleb Williams</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-wordsworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Wordsworth</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jeanne-moskal" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeanne Moskal</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/nigel-alderman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nigel Alderman</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-kandl" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Kandl</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/robert-f-gleckner" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert F. Gleckner</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/thomas-pfau" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Pfau</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-m-hess" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan M. Hess</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/scott-harshbarger" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scott Harshbarger</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/scott-mceathron" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scott McEathron</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/james-c-mckusick" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James C. McKusick</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/york" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">York</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/oxford" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Oxford</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/toronto" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Toronto</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/lincoln" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lincoln</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/boston" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Boston</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/baltimore" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Baltimore</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/athens" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Athens</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/miami" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Miami</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/chicago" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Chicago</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/nebraska" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nebraska</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/ohio" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ohio</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/minnesota" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Minnesota</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/virginia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Virginia</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/southern-california" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Southern California</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/hawaii" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hawaii</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/new-york" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New York</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/washington" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Washington</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/michigan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michigan</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/missouri" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Missouri</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/new-mexico" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New Mexico</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/oklahoma" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Oklahoma</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/california" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">California</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/georgia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Georgia</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/arizona" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arizona</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/colorado" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Colorado</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/ontario" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ontario</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/texas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Texas</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/kentucky" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kentucky</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/tennessee" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tennessee</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/pennsylvania" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Pennsylvania</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/florida" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Florida</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/north-carolina" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">North Carolina</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/massachusetts" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Massachusetts</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/arkansas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arkansas</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/columbia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Columbia</a></li></ul></section>Fri, 04 May 2012 20:00:08 +0000rc-admin23088 at http://www.rc.umd.eduGender and Genrehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/sceptic/genderandgenre.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2004-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2004</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table width="640" cellpadding="5" align="center">
<tr>
<td>
<h2 class="title1" align="center">Gender and Genre</h2>
<p class="nolineheight"><b>The three essays in this section, all previously unpublished, explore the interactions between the gender of the poet and the genre of her poem and how these affect the poem's reception, both upon its publication in 1820, and among critics now.</b><br/></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<td>
<hr size="1"/>
<p class="nolineheight"><a href="/editions/sceptic/darklingplain.html">"A darkling plain": Hemans, Byron and <i>The Sceptic; A Poem</i></a><br/>
<em>By Nanora Sweet.</em><br/>
This essay challenges the traditional assumption that <i>The Sceptic</i> is a didactic poem and instead argues that it is an epideictic poem of praise and blame that taunts Byron's scepticism and responds with its own. The essay thus raises questions about Hemans's own perceptions of herself as a woman writing poetry because didacticism was seen as an appropriate tone for a woman writer, a natural extension of her nurturing role as mother and mentor. <a href="/editions/sceptic/contestingheterodoxy.html"><br/>
<br/>
Contesting Heterodoxy: Mrs. Hemans vs. Lord Byron</a><br/>
<em>A 1993 conference paper by Andrew Elfenbein.<br/></em> This paper argues that when Hemans approaches Byron in subject and style, she reveals the early nineteenth century's "expanding borders of femininity" that both claim a public voice and assume the mantle of convention. About his contribution to this work, Elfenbein writes: "This is an unrevised version of a talk I gave at the first NASSR conference in 1993. Many, many important contributions to Hemans criticism have been made since that time, and were I to write this talk today, it would look quite different. While I hope that readers of Hemans will find it useful, I would certainly encourage any reader to consider this piece in light of the larger body of work on Hemans that has appeared since that time, including the scholarship of Susan Wolfson, Tricia Lootens, Herbert Tucker, Nan Sweet, and Paula Feldman." <a href="/editions/sceptic/costs.html"><br/>
<br/>
Scepticism and Its Costs: Hemans's Reading of Byron</a><br/>
<em>A 1994 conference paper by Nanora Sweet.</em><br/>
This essay reads the Hemans-Byron debate about scepticism as an event in post-Napoleonic print culture whose primary implications were nonetheless material. It emphasizes the surprising convergences between Hemans and Byron: the concern both poets show for the vulnerable young, the value they place on the civic republic and the divine force both invoke in defence of both the young and the republic.<br/>
<br/></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31535">Electronic Editions</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/editions/sceptic/index.html">The Sceptic; A Poem: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/sweet-nanora">Sweet, Nanora</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-52 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Section:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/section/editions/the-sceptic-a-hemans-byron-dialogue" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li></ul></section>Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:17:41 +0000rc-admin17295 at http://www.rc.umd.edu"A darkling plain": Hemans, Byron and The Sceptic; A Poemhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/sceptic/darklingplain.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2004-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2004</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head><title></title></head>
<body>
<h2>"A darkling plain": Hemans, Byron and <i>The Sceptic; A Poem</i></h2>
<p class="title2">Nanora Sweet</p>
<ol>
<li>In her 1820 pamphlet poem, <em>The Sceptic</em>, twenty-six-year-old Felicia Hemans attacked Lord Byron's scepticism about the afterlife on the grounds that as a posture, it was dishonest, and as a program, it added darkness to a world already sufficiently dark. For her pains, she was welcomed by John Taylor Coleridge in the <em>Quarterly Review</em> as an alternative to "the most dangerous writer of the present day," while herself remaining "always pure in thought and expression, cheerful, affectionate, and pious."<a href="#n1">[1]</a> Her "dangerous" opponent went unnamed in both poem and review, but Byron's biography and poetry were recognizable in her text. In a June 1820 letter to John Murray, Hemans's publisher as well as his own, Byron responded this way to <em>The Sceptic</em>: "Mrs. Hemans is a poet also&#8211;but too stilted, &amp; apostrophic&#8211;&amp; quite wrong. Men died calmly before the Christian era, and since, without Christianity."<a href="#n2">[2]</a> (<a href="/editions/sceptic/byronsletters.html">Read Byron's Letter</a>)<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>As a study of Byron, Hemans, and scepticism, this hypertext aims to lay bare the controversial and intellectual context of their debate. It aims also to illuminate <em>The Sceptic</em> as a poem ("<em>A Poem</em>"), for it was (and in many ways remains) an Arnoldian "darkling plain" where Hemans and Byron did battle over doubt and faith early in the nineteenth century and in poetries which may never again be equaled in material success or artistic ambition.<a href="#n3">[3]</a> A polemic that modulates even as it daunts, <em>The Sceptic</em> has remained neglected among Hemans's poems until very recently, even as her lyrics, progress poems, dramas, and tales receive new attention. Yet in 1984 one of the poet's most astute readers, Peter Trinder, pronounced it "a remarkable poem in its subject and its performance."<a href="#n4">[4]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li>We assemble this Hemans-Byron hypertext in the belief that a Hemans without <em>The Sceptic</em> is an ambitious woman poet defanged, and a Byron without <em>The Sceptic</em> is a privileged poet going unanswered by the sex to whom he is purportedly the "most dangerous." <em>The Sceptic</em> serves to anchor this "intertext" including Byron's <em>Childe Harold's Pilgrimage</em> and <em>Manfred</em>, Hemans's "The Domestic Affections" and <em>Tales</em>, <i>and Historic Scenes</i>, and much more. Taken together, contributors to the hypertext suggest that Hemans and Byron contest much the same poetical-polemical territory in history, science, philosophy, and theology. Some of us even propose that these poets reverse roles as sceptics and believers. I argue here that Hemans matched Byron with a scepticism of her own, one befitting a poet who wielded the Sophists' own rhetoric of epideictic and enthymeme.
<h4><br/><br/>Felicia Hemans and Lord Byron</h4>
</li>
<li>As the two most published poets female and male of Britain's nineteenth century, Hemans and Byron belong in the same critical conversation.<a href="#n5">[5]</a> Aware of each other as competitors, acting as mutual provocateurs, they shared subject, style, and audience during the poetry "boom" of the late- and post-Napoleonic eras. Both were teenage prodigies in this environment, meeting adversity at the hands of critics and reaching for maturity in the lofty idioms of Pope and Milton, which somehow they made into spectacularly successful poetries of their own.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>On Hemans's side, the evidence of relationship is anecdotal, documentary, and literary. On hearing the news of his mother's prize from the Royal Society of Literature (for <em>Dartmoor</em>), Arthur Hemans crowed, "Now, I am sure Mama is a better poet than Lord Byron!" The poet's memoirist (and sister) claims, unconvincingly, that this sentiment did not originate with the adults of the family.<a href="#n6">[6]</a> Hemans was known to wear a lock of Byron's hair and to request his chosen epitaph <em>Implora pace</em> for her own. She drew on him for epigraphs more frequently than any other writer. Still, her <em>Modern Greece</em> (1817) opposed him on the Elgin marbles, and however obliquely, she attacked him and his fellow Promethean Percy Shelley in <em>The Sceptic</em> (1820) and <em>Dartmoor</em> (1821).<a href="#n7">[7]</a> When Thomas Moore's moderately scandalous <em>Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life</em> appeared in 1830, Hemans distanced herself from the noble poet and wrote approvingly of Wordsworth instead. Yet she never expunged Byronic resonance from her text or, as criticism shows, deleted it from her textual practice.<a href="#n8">[8]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li>On Hemans's side, the evidence of relationship is anecdotal, documentary, and literary. On hearing the news of his mother's prize from the Royal Society of Literature (for <em>Dartmoor</em>), Arthur Hemans crowed, "Now, I am sure Mama is a better poet than Lord Byron!" The poet's memoirist (and sister) claims, unconvincingly, that this sentiment did not originate with the adults of the family.<a href="#n6">[6]</a> Hemans was known to wear a lock of Byron's hair and to request his chosen epitaph <em>Implora pace</em> for her own. She drew on him for epigraphs more frequently than any other writer. Still, her <em>Modern Greece</em> (1817) opposed him on the Elgin marbles, and however obliquely, she attacked him and his fellow Promethean Percy Shelley in <em>The Sceptic</em> (1820) and <em>Dartmoor</em> (1821).<a href="#n7">[7]</a> When Thomas Moore's moderately scandalous <em>Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life</em> appeared in 1830, Hemans distanced herself from the noble poet and wrote approvingly of Wordsworth instead. Yet she never expunged Byronic resonance from her text or, as criticism shows, deleted it from her textual practice.<a href="#n8">[8]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li>On Byron's side is the evidence of letters and poems.<a href="#n9">[9]</a> He praised Hemans's <em>The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy</em> (1816) as "a good poem&#8212;very." In form, the Italian canto of his <em>Childe Harold's Pilgrimage</em> (1818) is a progress poem like her <i>Restoration</i>, one featuring Italian art work and a sequence of female prosopopoeias. After Hemans opposed him in <em>Modern Greece</em> (published anonymously but soon identified as hers) and attacked him in <em>The Sceptic</em>, Byron distanced himself from her (7 June 1820). In one breath, he disputed her convictions about the afterlife and decried the "apostrophic" style that, now authoring <em>Don Juan</em>, he believed he no longer shared with her. In letters to their mutual publisher Murray, Byron satirized Hemans as a "feminine He-man" and "Mrs. Hewoman."<a href="#n10">[10]</a>
<h4><br/><br/>The Critical Record</h4>
</li>
<li>As if to follow Byron's lead, Jerome McGann and Susan Wolfson make a shared Hemans-Byron style their point of departure in studies of Romanticism, gender, and ideology. In <em>The Poetics of Sensibility</em> (1995) McGann continued his campaign against Wordsworthian "Romantic ideology" by joining, pincer-like, the sensibility of the 1790s, an aesthetic of "excess," to the sentimentality of Byron, Hemans, and Landon, a poetics of "loss."<a href="#n11">[11]</a> In her recent "Hemans and the Romance of Byron," Wolfson uncovers a pattern of verbal intimacy between these poets, a volatile intertextual "romance" compounded on Hemans's part of love and competition, resonance and misprision.<a href="#n12">[12]</a> Byron may have seduced Hemans, but in Wolfson's reading Hemans's strong (mis)prisions expose the would-be philosophical libertine as a sometime conservative whose heroines cannot be sexually free and still live. The work of McGann and Wolfson shows the high stakes and strong currents (Arnoldian "turbid ebb and flow"?) in studies of Byron and Hemans today.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Behind the notable studies of McGann and Wolfson lies a body of groundbreaking but still unpublished writing on Byron and Hemans.<a href="#n13">[13]</a> Two dissertations from the mid-1990s compared the critical and cultural reception of these poets: Dan Albergotti's "Hemans, Byron, and the Reviewers, 1807-1835" (1995) and Chad Edgar's "The Negotiations of the Romantic Popular Poet" (1996).<a href="#n14">[14]</a> Byron figures on a somewhat smaller scale in my dissertation on Hemans and the Cult of the South. The historical burdens and predatory plots of the Cult's great genres (Italianate triumph and Oriental tale) play a part in my 1994 conference paper on <em>The Sceptic</em>, "Scepticism and its Costs: Hemans's Reading of Byron."<a href="#n15">[15]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Another early conference paper presented here is Andrew Elfenbein's 1993 "Contesting Heterodoxy: Mrs. Hemans vs. Lord Byron."<a href="#n16">[16]</a> Elfenbein's paper turns on the markedly "literary" style of Hemans and Byron, which it finds the site of an early nineteenth-century contest between "normativity" and "heterodoxy." While for McGann the Hemans-Byron style posed a problem in the manner of critical Marxism, for Elfenbein questions of style find answers in normative discourse as understood through Foucault. As Elfenbein writes, "The puzzle is how she was able to address such a wide range of issues without being attacked as a bluestocking. The answer lies in the expanding borders of femininity at the beginning of the nineteenth century". Though Elfenbein devotes his discussion to Hemans's more obviously "literary" <em>The Forest Sanctuary</em> (1825), he lists <em>The Sceptic</em> as among those texts that, but for the finesse of her normative stylistics, would've been deemed "bluestocking."<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Notwithstanding the imagery and "conditions of extremity" that Hartman finds in <em>The Sceptic</em>, she follows Elfenbein in preferring the narrative poem <em>The Forest Sanctuary</em> for her study of Hemans's poetry of faith and doubt.<a href="#n17">[17]</a> The poet's memoirist Henry Chorley did likewise in 1836, and his description of <em>The Sceptic</em> may provide the clue to this pattern: it was "the only poem, of a purely didactic character, ever written by Mrs. Hemans" (1: 51).<a href="#n18">[18]</a> In twentieth-century criticism, <em>didacticism</em> has, however, been antithetical to the <em>literary</em>. Narrative ingredients in <em>The Forest Sanctuary</em> give Elfenbein purchase on its gender politics and religious ideology, but <em>The Sceptic</em> seems to offer few such literary handles. The problem of genre appears to have left <em>The Sceptic</em><i>; A Poem</i> (A Poem?) at the critical starting gate. Some fresh thoughts about gender and polemics in the early nineteenth century might re-introduce <em>The Sceptic</em> and the kind of poem it is.
<h4><br/><br/>Scepticism and the War of Ideas I:</h4>
</li>
<li>Engaged readers of Hemans find that <em>The Sceptic</em> stands oddly in her work: as a long poem it belongs to her ambitious first period, but as a religious work it has affinities with her late devotional writing.<a href="#n19">[19]</a> To compound the problem, Hemans's critics are accustomed to writing about neither of these periods but rather the lyrics and dramatic monologues of her middle period and its popular volume <i>Records of Woman</i> (1828).<a href="#n20">[20]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Critics of <em>The Sceptic</em> seem to agree that it is the work of a young woman unusually well-prepared to enter public debate on a highly charged topic and conducted in verse, but they are hard put to account for all the poem's active ingredients together&#8211;gender, the generation of ideas, genre. We might reopen discussion by posing Elfenbein's question again, How was it that this poem's author escaped being drummed out of court as a bluestocking? In 1798 the antijacobin Reverend Polwhele lambasted the Wollstonecraftian woman who "unsex'd" herself on "the public scene," and for twenty years his drumming out seemed to have satisfied public opinion.<a href="#n21">[21]</a> As recently as 1812, Anna Barbauld's long career had been closed by politically interested <em>ad feminam</em> attacks on her <em>Eighteen Hundred and Eleven</em>, with John Wilson Croker decrying her presumptions to "satire" and a "pamphlet in verse."<a href="#n22">[22]</a> In 1820, though, Hemans was praised publicly and fulsomely for her impeccable comportment and lofty purpose in entering the lists against dangerous irreligion (the <em>Quarterly Review</em> and <em>Edinburgh Monthly Review</em>), while Lord Byron resorted to the semi-privacy of his letters to Murray to satirize her as a "blue" for her work in <em>The Sceptic</em> (BLJ 7: 158).<a href="#n23">[23]</a> Whether her entry was truly more acceptable, as Elfenbein suggests&#8211;or her blue-like presumption still an issue but now less mentionable, as Byron's half-public, half-private innuendo suggests&#8211;isn't quite clear.<a href="#n24">[24]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li>If a woman poet entering "the public scene" in poetry in 1820 could still draw the label "blue," the results would be oppressive for both poet and poem, for she would be caricatured and her poem rendered "didactic" in a negative sense.<a href="#n25">[25]</a> What if the question we should be posing is not whether the poet is "blue"&#8212;a matter that won't quite come clear&#8211;but rather whether the poem is "didactic" and thus a poem of instruction? What if, <em>contra</em> Chorley and almost everyone else, <em>The Sceptic</em> is not a "didactic" poem?<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>There is another term than "didactic" for the polemical writing evident in <em>The Sceptic</em> and that is "epideictic," a performative mode of ceremonial and generalizable praise and blame, an occasional poetry keyed to biography and civic values, a rhetorical mode developed by the Sophists and catalogued by Aristotle.<a href="#n26">[26]</a> Peter Trinder might be describing such a poem when he calls <em>The Sceptic</em> "remarkable in . . . performance" and says, "The poem must be read as a whole . . . especially because its coherent structure is quite powerful in itself" (27). As an epideictic poem <em>The Sceptic</em> would purvey ideas but also perform them and in excess. It would be showy like Byron's <em>English Bards</em> and <em>Childe Harold</em>, rather than restrained, like Hannah More's <em>The Black Slave Trade: A Poem</em> or <em>Strictures on Female Education</em>.<a href="#n27">[27]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li>I would submit that, as a writer of numerous occasional poems and no (other) instructional poems, in <em>The Sceptic</em> Hemans is writing an epideictic poem. By writing in epideictic's distinctively biographical but general terms, she can catch up in her apostrophes a Byron, a Hume, a Shelley, and all they signify and with the periphrasis of epithet render them creatures of their own time and even handiwork: "the young Eagle," "the cold Sceptic," "mortal!," "demigod!," "child of the dust!," "son of the morning." (For whom is <em>The Sceptic</em> "too...apostrophic"?) Writing in a genre that is by turns panegyric and invective, she equips herself for the tonal complexity that Hartman and others hint at, one that sympathizes and hectors by turns and even simultaneously. Here, with a merciless sympathy, she apprehends Byron in flight from his Separation Crisis:
<blockquote>And did all fail thee, in the hour of wrath,<br/>
When burst th' o'erwhelming vials on thy path ?<br/>
Could not the voice of Fame inspire thee then,<br/>
O spirit ! scepter'd by the sons of men,<br/>
With an Immortal's courage, to sustain<br/>
The transient agonies of earthly pain ?<br/></blockquote>
</li>
<li>The Sceptic may not believe in God, but he sheds his faith in "Fame" with difficulty. The fame that offers no support in life ("the transient agonies of earthly pain") still tempts him to imagine a glorious death on "the couch of suicide" (<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#280">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, line 282</a>), as she depicts with merciless farce:
<blockquote>A closing triumph, a majestic scene,<br/>
Where gazing nations watch the hero's mien,<br/>
As, undismay'd amidst the tears of all,<br/>
He folds his mantle, regally to fall !<br/>
(<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#355">Go to <i>The Sceptic</i>, line 355</a>)<br/></blockquote>
</li>
<li>Writing in a genre that is biographical but also occasional and civic, she is able to deal in delicious <em>ad hominem</em> allusions as well as generalized epithets. She can even offer compelling keyhole views of the private souls at issue in a Humean science of mind:
<blockquote>And if, when slumber's lonely couch is prest,<br/>
The form departed be thy spirit's guest,<br/>
It bears no light from purer worlds to this;<br/>
Thy future lends not e'en a dream of bliss.<br/>
(<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#125">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, line 125</a>)<br/></blockquote>
</li>
<li>The epideictic writer can arraign the lordly fugitive and in the next breath reprise the royal ode; she can turn from Byron's "cold" posthumous life to Charlotte's warm maternal death. (<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#455">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, line 457</a>)<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Engaged in genre, particularly civic genre, Hemans can recall other genres of historical weight, especially the epic. Using Vergil's phrase "Was it for <em>this</em>. . . .?" (spoken and echoed in <i>The Aeneid</i> 4), she can remind the would-be sceptical hero that his specialized preparations and their squandering (like Manfred's, those of a cosmic consciousness) are charges borne communally: "Was it for <em>this</em> thy still-unwearied eye / Kept vigil with the watchfires of the sky / . . .?" (<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#255">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, line 255</a>). Going before her, Byron had applied this epic tag to a woman hero, Augustina, the Maid of Saragoza: "Is it for this the Spanish maid, , , / . . . / . . .all unsex'd the Anlace hath espoused/ . . .?" (<i>Childe Harold</i> 1.54). When Hemans applies the tag to her own Spanish woman warrior, Zayda in <i>The Abencerrage</i>, the Polwhelian inflection ("all unsex'd") falls away: "Was it for this I loved thee?" (Wolfson, <i>Hemans</i>, p. 128, l. 461).<a href="#n28">[28]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li><em>The Sceptic</em>'s sort of verse&#8211;personalized, risk-taking, hubristic, issue-calling&#8211;is even less commonly associated with women writers than didactic verse.<a href="#n29">[29]</a> Here in the epideictic lies the presumption of a young woman going up against the leading male writer of the day: a woman matching her own presumption with the (auto)biographical hubris of one for whom "the world" itself ranks as a disappointed lover or, if it's lucky, a fair foe (<em>Childe Harold</em> 3.113-14). A young woman can only gain energy from matching this match, which her cat-call ("Was it for <em>this</em>. . .?) has already made a matter of gender reversal (Byron's Augustina, her own Zayda). Here is a poetry of (auto)biographical occasion in which youthful crushes (Byron's for Edleston, perhaps Hemans's for Byron) can be the serious stuff of poetry, a bio-poetry after all of time and temporality, of youth and death rather than instruction and orthodoxy. It is epideictic poetry, I submit, that accommodates and accounts for the hubristic heights and unsounded depths of an intertext made up of <em>Childe Harold, Manfred,</em> "The Abencerrage," <em>The Sceptic</em> and more. It is epideictic poetry that Hemans practices in poems contemporaneous with <em>The Sceptic</em>&#8211;her royal odes&#8211;and <i>Stanzas to the Memory of the Late King</i> would be republished with <em>The Sceptic</em>; it is epideictic poetry that hyperlinks <em>The Sceptic</em> with Childe Harold 4 when both make a late turn to elegy in saluting Princess Charlotte.<a href="#n30">[30]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li><a name="2"> </a>It is epideictic poetry in its panegyric mode that accounts for <em>The Sceptic's</em> epigraph from a funeral oration by seventeenth-century French cleric Bossuet&#8211;specifically, his oration for a Princess endangered by a libertine and sceptical culture. We note that Hemans does not cite from the more <em>didactic</em> work of Bossuet, which was notable for having brought about the (fleeting) conversion of Hemans's favorite sceptic historian, Edward Gibbon, to Catholicism. (<a href="/editions/sceptic/commentary.html#Epigraph">Go to Commentary on <em>The Sceptic's</em> Epigraph.</a>) It is epideictic poetry in its invective mode that accounts for the negative excess in the poem and its notes compounded of an Old Testament God and the Apocalypse (<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#n1a">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, "Notes"</a>). These negative energies strain containment in "normativity"; they are what drive the poem's polemic, make up Hemans's own version of <em>scepticism</em>, and make her polemic a "war of ideas" that takes no prisoners and spills over into a new era (<a href="http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem89.html">Go to "Dover Beach"</a>):
<blockquote>And we are here as on a darkling plain<br/>
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,<br/>
Where ignorant armies clash by night.<br/></blockquote>
</li>
<li>In her very attraction to Byron she is brought closer to him and his "antiphilosophical" scepticism whose method might be described as "negative dialectics."<a href="#n31">[31]</a> But how account for those readers of Hemans who have credited <em>The Sceptic</em> with not only instruction but consolation?<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Students of Hemans will recall a letter from Hannah More in which, given Hemans's achievement in <em>Modern Greece</em> of "just views" and "delicate perceptions," More anticipates "no small pleasure" and, she hopes, "benefit" from <em>The Sceptic</em> (Hughes 34, Wolfson, <i>Hemans</i> 533). Any response she had after reading the poem was not, to my knowledge, recorded. Like other critics of Hemans, More searches for the logos of orthodoxy but lingers over its supplement literature. Harriet Hughes offers testimonials from two other readers of <em>The Sceptic</em> who might match More in piety. Their ingenuous reactions seem less interesting, somehow, than the poet's own studied responses. In a letter to one grief-stricken friend who found consolation in <em>The Sceptic</em>, Hemans sounds more the <em>writer</em> <em><u>sceptical</u></em> of her own effects&#8211;second-guessing her rhetoric, fishing about for compliments&#8211;than the ministrant serene in her faith:
<blockquote>Perhaps, when your mind is sufficiently composed, you will inform me which were the passages distinguished by the approbation of that pure and pious mind: they will be far more highly valued by me than anything I have ever written. (Hughes 34)<br/></blockquote>
</li>
<li>To date, the critic who has studied Hemans most searchingly as a consolatory writer is Michael Williamson, in "Impure Affections: Felicia Hemans's Elegiac Poetry and Contaminated Grief." His conclusion, that her work is profoundly anti-consolatory and given instead to an excess of negativity, would disappoint More. For Williamson, Hemans "redirects our attention away from dramas of elegiac transformation and inheritance and toward often unsuccessful dramas of <em>survival.</em>"<a href="#n32">[32]</a> In readings of ten elegiac poems from throughout Hemans's career, Williamson finds depicted not the augmentation but "the waste of women's psychic and imaginative energy in a world tainted by male death" (19): in short, "a darkling plain." Barbara Taylor and I explore similar readings of Hemans's youthful "The Domestic Affections" in connection with <em>The Sceptic</em>. As in elegy, so in epideictic: Hemans's polemics against "The Sceptic" and her own expressions of radical doubt form a package that is simply too self-critical and self-confounding to be recuperated to "didacticism" or a "normative femininity." And all the same, the poetry might after all be consoling or at least bracing for those who can be assuaged by the fairly strong tonic. As a polemical and specifically epideictic poem of praise and blame, then, <em>The Sceptic</em> offers a level of critical purchase that is not merely potential but actual and continuously so.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>But moving now from gender and genre to the generation of ideas in <em>The Sceptic</em>, I look again for collaboration to Barbara Taylor, whose close readings abide by the "particularities" of a Marilyn Butler rather than the broad epistemes of a Foucault. In completing my own offering on scepticism as a rhetorical-poetical "war of ideas," I turn to the close grappling between Byron and Hemans over the enthymeme, or rhetorical syllogism, which like the epideictic is a legacy of the classical Sophism.<a href="#n33">[33]</a>
<h4><br/><br/>Scepticism and the War of Ideas II: Believers and Sceptics</h4>
</li>
<li>As we would expect from two such passionate writers as Hemans and Byron, the ideas at issue here are not cool, colorless counters but elements in a cruel logic all too recognizable as human destiny<a href="#n34">[34]</a>. Both poets are historical rather than ontological thinkers; for them ideas form and deform themselves in bodies and blood. Appropriately, it is neither <em>deity</em> nor <em>creed</em> in the first instance that is subject to their debate over scepticism but rather the <em>afterlife</em>; for a deity can serve principally, as he does in <em>The Sceptic</em>, to guarantee an afterlife, and a creed to guarantee a deity.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>In this light <em>Childe Harold's Pilgrimage</em> Canto 2, stanzas 3-9 (<a href="/editions/sceptic/Pilgrimage.html#canto2">Go to <i>Childe Harold's Pilgrimage</i> ~Canto 2</a>), becomes a key passage. Set on the Acropolis these stanzas perform a typically Byronic swerve, in this case from invective to elegy. Tracing history as a palimpsest of religion, Byron decries the way religions extort the sacrifice of this life for the promise of another afterwards; he welcomes the civilization obtained by Socratic scepticism; then, stunningly, he concedes that scepticism will be betrayed and religion served in the grieving lover's heart. As part of the debate over scepticism portrayed by Taylor, this passage attracted "extraordinary interest" on publication (Edgar 76, 82-87). It is framed by further generic and tonal work of great interest, for stanzas 1-2 offer an epic invocation to Athena and stanzas 10-15 a meditation on the Parthenon and invective against Lord Elgin.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>In this scene of Athenian democracy violated, Byron depicts the parade of "creeds" for whom a "victim bleeds" (st. 3-6) before unveiling Socrates's wise scepticism about those creeds:
<blockquote>Well didst thou speak, Athena's wisest son!<br/>
'All that we know is, nothing can be known.'<br/>
(st. 7)<br/></blockquote>
</li>
<li>We do not rest here, for the section moves on to the individual's desire to believe against all scepticism of "sophist" and "Sadducee" that "there be / A land of souls beyond that sable shore" (st. 7-8). The section concludes with an elegiac stanza (9, keyed to Edleston) that underwrites both our concern for the generically young male victim who "bleeds" under the "creeds" in stanza 3 <em>and</em> our desire that such victims live eternally as only those same creeds can promise. This poetic confounding, part and parcel of Byron's epideictic verse, resonates in Hemans's verse as well. In <em>The Sceptic</em>, hope of an afterlife appears early as a promise of light&#8212;one that graces our stay on however rocky an earth (<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#25">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, line 27</a>)&#8212;but later it shades into a (dark, insubstantial) shadow cast by "the Rock of Ages" (<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#335">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, line 338</a>). While Byron belies scepticism with faith, Hemans belies faith with scepticism, and neither reversal rests there.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>In Byron's passage, believers and sceptics are historically specific and temperamentally passionate: "'Twas Jove's&#8212;'tis Mahomet's&#8212;"; "The Sadducee / And sophists, madly vain of dubious lore" (st. 3, 8).(<a href="/editions/sceptic/Pilgrimage.html#canto2.3">Go to <em>Childe Harold's Pilgrimage</em></a>) The individual caught in the midst of the debate is flesh and blood, a "Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds" (st. 3). This "child"'s hopes and fears are less for himself than for "thou!&#8211;whose love and life together fled"; "thou" whom he may never meet again, "thou" whom "'twere bliss enough to know thy spirit blest!" (st. 9). As elsewhere in Canto 2, here the occasion for elegy is young male loveliness dead betimes: "Thou art gone, thou lov'd and lovely one, / Whom youth and youth's affection bound to me" (st. 95). "Doubt and Death" are matters of passion and occasion, not of bloodless epistemology and ontology.<a href="#n35">[35]</a> So the issues play themselves out in Hemans, as both writers show themselves sceptical about scepticism.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Arguments pursued in these poems take the form of "enthymemes," curtal syllogisms, which like the epideictic mode are a legacy of the Sophists. As Jeffrey Walker describes it, the enthymeme works from "a network of oppositions" toward a "passional identification" worthy of its root meaning, <em>thymos</em> as heart. In Aristotle's words, it is "'the body of persuasion."'<a href="#n36">[36]</a> As Walker points out, the enthymeme emerges in relationship to "opportunity" or "occasion"; arriving at identification in the moment. It may seem but a partial syllogism, one that leaps to conclusions; but hinging as it does on the body&#8211;on biography in history, an audience's material investment in its own destiny&#8211;the enthymeme invokes its missing premise of "necessity." When J. T. Coleridge said of Hemans's argument in <em>The Sceptic</em> that it "is one of irresistible force. . simply resting the truth of religion on the necessity of it; on the utter misery and helplessness of man without it," he is reading the poem enthymemically. Trinder's perception that Hemans offers an argument for "the necessity of deism" (27) is of the same order, while revealing more of her critique of orthodoxy.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li><a name="1"> </a>As certainly for Hemans as for Byron, this debate <em>about</em> scepticism is an argument about history carried out in history. Elsewhere Hemans reveals her interest in Gibbon's sceptical historiography.<a href="#n37">[37]</a> (<a href="/editions/sceptic/commentary.html#Epigraph">Go to Commentary on <em>The Sceptic's</em> Epigraph.</a>) Sceptical discussions of <em>The Sceptic</em> historian Barthold Niebuhr appear in her letters and the books of her beloved son Charles, who revels in Niebuhr's convincing representation of a legend in which he, Niebuhr, did not believe. This is the legend of Numa, Rome's pacific second king, and his muse-consort Egeria. In a nice counterpoint to Hemans's epithets for Byron, Maria Jane Jewsbury gave her the literary name "Egeria." (Go to Commentary on <em>The Sceptic's</em> Epigraph.) That Hemans often linked her interest in doubt and belief to pre-Christian legend rather than Christian dogma is, however, a subject for another day.<a href="#n38">[38]</a><br/>
<br/></li>
<li>What's important to note at all points in the Hemans-Byron debate (or collusion?) over scepticism is that matters of belief are not <em>doxa</em> but sanctions, sanctions in the historical, material form of human sacrifice (the bleeding victims of <em>Childe Harold 2</em>, of <em>Dartmoor</em>) and its assuaging (the pacific rites of Numa and Egeria, the faith in Edleston as a "spirit blest"). What's at stake are young bodies subject to war and to love (war's marriage system), and both systems affect both poets, given the bisexual manhood of Byron and the regiment-ridden womanhood of Hemans (lest we forget her separation from Captain Hemans in 1818). For both poets, religion should keep an unbloodied altar (<a href="/editions/sceptic/Pilgrimage.html">Go to <em>Childe Harold's Pilgrimage</em></a>); for Hemans, religion should offer sanctuary&#8211;enough so on earth, that we can believe so in heaven; with a reverse argument actually the weaker. (<a href="/editions/sceptic/commentary.html#cities">Read the note "Then ye shall appoint you cities"</a>).<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Hemans and Byron are institutional rather than theological writers, and they write as though at the mercy of their and their audience's dispensations. While these (Christianity; Roman state religion; the same?) would displace vengeance and bloody sacrifice, they do so only to renew and even institutionalize them.<a href="#n39">[39]</a> <a name="fly"> </a>Hemans may urge <em>The Sceptic</em> to "Call thou on Him" when the "lightning" of vengeance flies&#8211;"Fly to the City of thy Refuge, fly!"&#8211;but the refuge offered has been designed by Levites for a Slayer and it brings him surely to trial. (<a href="#n5a">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, note 5</a>) Such is the unbloodied altar and such our earthly sanctuary: "Is earth still Eden?" she has asked <em>The Sceptic</em>, "Is all so cloudless and so calm below / That we seek no fairer scenes than <em>life</em> can show?" (l. 23-24). Heaven mirrors the scene at the City of our Refuge, however, for the Father remains the Avenger stopped at the gates and the Son is still the "still small" Hope of acquittal (<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#50">Go to <em>The Sceptic</em>, line 53</a> and <a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#340">line 344</a>) once inside that city :
<blockquote>If Hope's retreat hath been, through all the past,<br/>
The shadow by the Rock of Ages cast,<br/>
Father, forsake us not !&#8212;<br/>
<br/>
<a name="mirror"> </a>and so heaven mirrors earth, its Avenger and its Hope.<br/></blockquote>
<h4><br/><br/>Scepticism and the War of Ideas III: Scepticism and the Post-War</h4>
</li>
<li>The Hemans-Byron poetic war of ideas couldn't end with Waterloo. For both, the earthly institutions of wartime and postwar Britain remained at issue: for Hemans, the prisons, schools, and temples; for Byron, the theater, legislature, courts; for both, the press. Hemans re-engineered benevolence in the company of women and men, as Marlon Ross portrayed in his 1989 <em>The Contours of Masculine Desire</em>. Byron sought to free young men <em>from</em> the rack of battle, altar, and factory frame and <em>for</em> a stage where (patriarchal) tragedy offered almost a loophole of cultural change and sexual difference.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Byron and Hemans could look back to Enlightenment thinkers, a Gibbon or Hume, Voltaire or Rousseau, for models of scepticism&#8211;and they did. But to be a <em>sceptic</em> in the years 1815-1820 was to be something a good deal less neutral and magisterial than an Enlightenment depiction would have it. With the French Revolution, Enlightenment scepticism had licensed the destruction of foundational institutions; in its encounter with history, Enlightenment scepticism could offer no opposition to unprincipled conquest; it could offer only (pace Anne Hartman) the unaccountable benevolence that bemused Britain's sceptical philosopher David Hume. Thus is confected Wordsworth's portrait of the Sceptic or Solitary in his 1814 <em>The Excursion</em>, and it is not one to inspire (<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww399.html">Go to Book II of <i>The Excursion</i></a>). Whether Wordworth's dazed and quixotic figure served to caution the age is hard to tell; Hemans read <em>The Excursion</em> and admired its "religious" passages in which "the poet speaks of departed friends" (perhaps in Book I? Hughes 38).<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>Certainly <em>The Excursion's</em> post-Revolutionary combination of complacency and malaise galled Percy Shelley, a member of this generation for whom "la guerre n'est pas finie."<a href="#n40">[40]</a> For this atheist, and his sceptical post-war colleague Byron, the work of scepticism was far from over, given the unreformed institutions at home and collusion with reactionary powers abroad. Hemans shared a passionate temperament with Byron and, needing the same surcease, adopted his plea, <em>Implora pace</em>.<a href="#n41">[41]</a> <em>The Sceptic</em> she loved and feared was not the bemused Hume or the dazed Wordsworthian Solitary but the passionate Byron or even Shelley who dared pick up Napoleon's Promethean mantle and restage the Titanic as the New.<br/>
<br/></li>
<li>In commenting on Hemans's <em>The Sceptic</em> as an engagement with Byron, I have recurred to the very interested debate between these most popular male and female poets, one appearing before the press in 1820 as a Christian Tory, the other as a radical sceptic. This debate, because it is interested, runs much deeper than partisanship, lending its cross-currents to the women and men who believe in and doubt the institutions that simultaneously destroy them and sustain them.</li>
</ol><br/>
<h4> Notes</h4>
<p align="left"> <br/>
<a name="n1"> </a><strong>1.</strong> Rev. of <em>The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy</em>, etc. By Felicia Hemans. <em>Quarterly Review</em> 24 (Oct. 1820): 130-39. On the basis of a letter [1820] by William Gifford to John Murray, this review is attributed to John Taylor Coleridge by Hill Shine and Helen Chadwick Shine in <em>The Quarterly Review Under Gifford: Identification of Contributors</em>, 1809-1824 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1949), 72, and again by Jonathan Cutmore in his continuously updated web resource, <em>The Quarterly Review, 1809-1824: Notes, Contents, and Identification of Contributors</em> (9-2-01): for Cutmore's attribution and a link to the review itself, see <i>Quarterly Review</i> index pages. As Cutmore notes, several Hemans scholars attribute the review to Gifford. My thanks to Susan Wolfson for pointing to a basis for the Gifford attribution: [Harriet Hughes, ed.] <em>The Works of Mrs Hemans</em>, 7 vols., (Edinburgh, Blackwood; London, Cadell, 1839), 3.150n, and again [Harriet Hughes, ed.] <em>The Poems of Felicia Hemans, A New Edition, Chronologically Arranged, With Illustrative Notes and a Selection of Contemporary Criticisms</em> (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1849, etc.), 190. For an interesting reading of the Coleridge review among others, see Chad Edgar, n. 7 below.<br/> </p>
<p align="left"> <a name="n2"> </a><strong>2.</strong> <em>Byron's Letters and Journals</em>, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols. (London: Murray, 1973-82). In subsequent references this work will be abbreviated BLJ.<br/> </p>
<p align="left"> <a name="n3"> </a><strong>3.</strong> The material success is the easier to measure, while evidence of these poets' powers is longer to tell. On one or both of these counts, see Paula Feldman, "The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace," <em>Keats-Shelley Journal</em> 46 (1997), 148-76; William St. Clair, <em>The Impact of Byron's Writings: An Evaluative Approach</em> (New York: St. Martin's, 1990); Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk, "Introduction: Why Hemans Now?" <em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</em>, 1-3, 11-12n3-5, and the volume at large. <a href="http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem89.html">See also Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem, "Dover Beach."<br/></a> </p>
<p align="left"> &#160;<strong><a name="n4"> </a>4.</strong> Peter W. Trinder's pamphlet-like <em>Mrs Hemans</em> (U of Wales P, 1984) remains the only critical monograph on the poet; he discusses <em>The Sceptic</em> on pages 27-29. There are now two modern scholarly editions of Hemans's work, but <em>The Sceptic</em> is not collected in either, making this electronic text the more necessary: Susan J. Wolfson, <em>Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, and Reception Materials</em> (Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000) and Gary Kelly, <em>Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters</em> (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002). <br/></p>
<p> <strong><a name="n5"> </a>5.</strong> See Donald H. Reiman, Introduction, <em>Poems, England and Spain, Modern Greece</em>, etc., by Felicia Hemans (New York: Garland, 1978) v. (Vols. 64-70 <em>The Romantic Context: Poetry, ed.</em> Donald H. Reiman, 1976-78.)<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n6"> </a><strong>6.</strong> Arthur Hemans quoted in [Harriet Hughes],"Memoir of Mrs Hemans," <em>The Works of Mrs Hemans</em>, 7 vols., (Edinburgh, Blackwood; London, Cadell, 1839), 1: 50 and note. Subsequent references to this source will be in text and to "Hughes."<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n7"> </a><strong>7.</strong> Though our project links <em>The Sceptic</em> to Byron's life and work, it has strong connections to Shelley's work from "Ozymandias" to "Alastor"; for related work see Armstrong, "Natural and National Monuments."<br/> </p>
<p> <strong><a name="n8"> </a>8.</strong> Henry Fothergill Chorley, <em>Memorials of Mrs. Hemans with Illustrations of Her Literary Character from Her Private Correspondence</em>, 2 vols. (London: Saunders &amp; Otley, 1836), 2: 106, 115. Regarding Hemans's continued use of Byron, see Chad Edgar's interesting argument that critics like J. T. Coleridge were attempting&#8211;and failing&#8211;to transfer "their sense of betrayal [over <i>Don Juan</i>] to Byron's female admirers." For Edgar, their attempt "suggests the overwhelmingly male orientation that characterizes the hostile reception of <em>Don Juan</em> and the distance that separates the reviewers' concerns from those of female readers and writers" ("The Negotiations of the Romantic Popular Poet: A Comparison of the Careers of Felicia Hemans and Lord Byron," diss., [New York University, 1996], 187).<br/> </p>
<p> <strong><a name="n9"> </a>9.</strong> Susan Wolfson conveniently collects these letter passages in her <em>Hemans</em>, 535-37.<br/> </p>
<p> <strong><a name="n10"> </a>10.</strong> Chorley 2: 323. BLJ 5: 108, 7: 113, 158, 183, 201. Keats is included in Byron's stylistic slur.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n11"> </a><strong>11.</strong> Jerome J. McGann, <em>The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style</em> (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Stephen C. Behrendt provides considerable evidence for such an aesthetic bridge in "The Gap that Is Not a Gap: British Poetry by Women, 1802-1812," <em>Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception</em>, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 25-45.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n12"> </a><strong>12.</strong> Susan J. Wolfson, "Hemans and the Romance of Byron," <em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</em>, ed. Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 155-80.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n13"> </a><strong>13.</strong> For a sense of publisher response to Hemans projects in the 1990s, see Susan Wolfson's "Editing Felicia Hemans for the Twenty-First Century" <em>Romanticism On the Net</em> 19 (August 2000) [13 December 2000].<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n14"> </a><strong>14.</strong> C. Dantzler Albergotti, "Byron, Hemans, and the Reviewers, 1807-1835," unpub. diss., University of South Carolina, 1995; Chad Edgar, see n. 7 above; and his related "Felicia Hemans and the Shifting Field of Romanticism" in <em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</em>, 124-34. One of the advantages of a web edition on Hemans is the notice it gives fugitive criticism&#8211;particularly dissertations and conference papers&#8211;written on Hemans during the period of her rapid reentry into critical discussion in the 1990s.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n15"> </a><strong>15.</strong> Nanora Louise Ziebold Sweet, "The Bowl of Liberty: Felicia Hemans and the Romantic Mediterranean," unpub. diss., University of Michigan, 1993 (82-132); see also Sweet, "Gender and Modernity in <em>The Abencerrage</em>: Hemans, Rushdie, and 'the Moor's Last Sigh,'" <em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</em>, 181-95.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n16"> </a><strong>16.</strong> Elfenbein gave his paper at the first meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, 1993, London, Ontario.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n17"> </a><strong>17.</strong> Chad Edgar similarly relocates Hemans's contentions with Byron in her 1823 play <em>The Vespers of Palermo</em> (188-224).<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n18"> </a><strong>18.</strong> Other critics go farther and characterize Hemans's work as "didactic" in general: see Angela Leighton in <em>Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart</em> (Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1992), 19, 38. While saying that Hemans's work offers "smooth didactic comforts," Leighton also senses the problem of genre, finding "an edge of scepticism," "the hint of scepticism, which occasionally ruffles the smooth public-speaking of her verse" (17, 19, 26). Like Elfenbein, Hartman, and Edgar, Leighton refers discussion of genre to Hemans's later poems, specifically her dramatic monologues (37ff).<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n19"> </a><strong>19.</strong> Julie Melnyk's "Hemans's Later Poetry: Religion and the Vatic Poet" (<em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</em>, 74-92) is the first published study of Hemans's late religious poetry.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n20"> </a><strong>20.</strong> The recognizably feminine concerns of this mid-career poetry have appealed to feminist critics, its sensitivity to changing market conditions to cultural critics. Paula R. Feldman's editing of <em>Records of Woman, With Other Poems</em> (Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 1999) provides a continuous feminist reading of the book. For further feminist examples go to <a href="http://www.umsl.edu/%7Esweet/swetbib.htm">Sweet's home page Bibliography:</a> Goslee (1996), Harding (1995), Kaplan (1975). McGann (op. cit.) illustrates the historicist interest in Hemans's middle period lyrics, Isobel Armstrong a combined feminist and cultural approach in "Msrepresentations: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry," <em>Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian</em>, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 3-32, and "Natural and National Monuments&#8211;Felicia Hemans's 'The Image in Lava': A Note," <em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</em>, 212-30.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n21"> </a><strong>21.</strong> For an interesting website concerning the Reverend Polwhele's 1798 poem "The Unsex'd Females" and women's poetry <a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/britpo/unsex/unsex.html">see "The Unsex'd Females."</a> For one of several astute commentaries on the Wollstonecraftian "backlash" and its effect on Romantic-era women poets like Hemans, see Andrew Ashfield, Introduction, <em>Romantic Women Poets, 1770-1838</em><i>: An Anthology</i> (Manchester: Manchester U P, 1995) xii-xiii. In <em>Victorian Women Poets</em>. Barbara Taylor notes that Polwhele competed (unsuccessfully) against Hemans in the Royal Society competition regarding <i>Dartmoor</i>.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n22"> </a><strong>22.</strong> For this passage from Croker's review in the <em>Quarterly Review</em> and a further survey of Barbauld's silencing in the press, see Duncan Wu, <em>Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology</em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 8.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n23"> </a><strong>23.</strong> For both reviews see Wolfson, <i>Hemans</i>, 530-35. See Wolfson's interesting analysis, too, of how "any contrary strains in the poetry. . .were elided, or if recognized, then contained in a 'hyper'-feminine passion, rather than sounded for subversive implications . . . ." (525).<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n24"> </a><strong>24</strong>. In 1841 George Gilfillan's review of Hemans in <em>Tait's Edinburgh Magazine</em> denies that Hemans was "blue"; evidently the question remained in the air; see n. 24.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n25"> </a><strong>25.</strong> See Marlon B. Ross, <em>The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry</em> (New York: Oxford, 1989). Ross offers a sympathetic reading of the eighteenth-century bluestockings but is sensitive to the label's "negative consequences" in Hemans's time (247). Gilfillan's review of Hemans in <em>Tait's</em> reveals how the "image" of the bluestocking is used to constrain the woman poet: She can assume "'the ludicrous image of a double-dyed Blue, in papers and morning wrapper, sweating at some stupendous treatise or tragedy from morn to noon,'" etc. Or she can turn "'from the duties or delights of the day to the employments of the desk,'" where with "'as little pedantry.. .as in writing a letter'" she can write "'a poem'" (Tait's 14 (1847): 361; qtd. Leighton 28-29).<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n26"> </a><strong>26.</strong> A source that cannot be bettered as a critical history of epideictic poetry is Jeffrey Walker, "Aristotle's Lyric: Re-Imagining the Rhetoric of Epideictic Song," <em>College English</em> 51.1 (Jan. 1989): 5-28 (my only reservation being the essay's monologic treatment of Romanticism). One of Walker's models epideictic writers is the great sophist Gorgias. For the premier modern treatment of the epideictic mode in rhetoric, see Ch[aim] Perelman and L. Olbrechsts-Tyteca, <em>The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation</em> (1958), trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1969).<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n27"> </a><strong>27.</strong> For a recent essay discussing Hemans's resistance to containment, see Susan Wolfson, "Felicia Hemans and the Revolving Doors of Reception," <em>Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception</em> (Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 1999), 214-41.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n28"> </a><strong>28.</strong> Readers of Wordsworth will recall this tab from Book I of <i>The Prelude</i>, l, 269. Epic similes carry Hemans into a Homeric territory in <i>The Sceptic</i>, a territory she shares with Byron who also enjoys analogies between earthquake and seaquake. With a cruel twist of fate worthy of the ancient master, she offers this analogy ("as. . ."): "as the sight of some far-distant shore" &#8211;once the drowning seaman's <u>home</u>&#8211;is now hopelessly out of his reach, so the winged "Hope" of <u>homely succor</u> has been shorn of her "plume" by the sceptic himself and it cannot pluck him up (do we recognize Coleridge's mariner with his albatross?). Later, in a passage whose sudden delicacy has made it a favorite of reviewers, the "hero" forgotten by "gazing nations" may die "unnoticed" as do "thousands": </p>
<blockquote>
As the light leaf, whose fall to ruin bears<br/>
Some trembling insect's little world of cares,<br/>
Descends in Silence&#8211;while around waves on<br/>
The mighty forest, reckless what is gone !<br/>
(<a href="/editions/sceptic/poem.html#355'">Click here to go to <i>The Sceptic</i>, line 359</a>)
</blockquote>
<p> <a name="n29"> </a><strong>29.</strong> Indeed, Anne Mellor has suggested that a broad band of Romantic-period women writers (not Hemans) can be distinguished from their male compeers on the basis of their rationality, with achievements like Mary Wollstonecraft's and Hannah More's in prose and didactic poetry leading the way. Mellor broaches this argument in <em>Romanticism and Gender</em> (New York: Routledge, 1993) and continues it in <em>Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England</em>, <i>1780-1830</i> (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2000). As capacious as is Mellor's work regarding prose and poetry, ultimately it steps away from the problem of a public poetics for Romantic-period women writers.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n30"> </a><strong>30.</strong> But see Taylor here about the republication of <em>The Sceptic</em>. For a study of elegies about the Princess, see Stephen C. Behrendt, <em>Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte</em> (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993).<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n31"> </a><strong>31.</strong> I adapt here from Terence Allan Hoagwood, <em>Byron's Dialectic: Scepticism and the Critique of Culture</em> (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell U P, 1993).<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n32"> </a><strong>32.</strong> Williamson, in <em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</em>, 20.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n33"> </a><strong>33.</strong> See Marilyn Butler, "Against Tradition: The Case for a Particularized Historical Method," <em>Historical Studies and Literary Criticism</em>, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1985), 25-47. Readers will notice that I adopt my term "war of ideas" from Butler's title <em>Jane Austen and the War of Ideas</em> (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). For a published illustration of Taylor's method, see "The Search for a Space: A Note on Felicia Hemans and the Royal Society of Literature," <em>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</em>, 115-23.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n34"> </a><strong>34.</strong> Another sort of scepticism&#8211;an ontological one regarding appearances and realities&#8211;is of course a long-standing topic in later Romantic studies, as in Donald H. Reiman, <em>Intervals of Inspiration: The Skeptical Tradition and the Psychology of Romanticism</em> (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1988).<br/> <br/> <a name="n35"> </a><strong>35.</strong> But Hartman's emphasis on Humean crises of identity and philosophies of emotion illustrates that epistemology does not have to be "bloodless."<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n36"> </a><strong>36.</strong> Jeffrey Walker, "The Body of Persuasion: A Theory of the Enthymeme," <em>College English</em> 56 (Jan. 1994): 46-65; here, p. 48.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n37"> </a><strong>37.</strong> Hemans cites Gibbon in <em>Tales, and Historic Scenes</em>'s "The Widow of Crescentius," "Alaric in Italy," and "The Abencerrage" (1819). On the latter see my "Gender and Modernity," p.189.<br/> </p>
<p> <a name="n38"> </a><strong>38.</strong> On Hemans and Niebuhr, see Chorley 2: 171: the poet is drawn to the scientific historian even while, according to Chorley, regarding him "as merely a sceptical inquirer into the traditions of antiquity; and it will be remembered with what small complacency or toleration she was prepared to regard any destroyer of the ancient legends in which her imagination took hold." See Charles Isidore Hemans, <em>Historic and Monumental Rome</em> (London: Williams and Norgate, 1874), 14, 45-47. Primitive Rome was epitomized for Byron and the Hemans (and Livy and Niebuhr) by Numa, Rome's pacific and legendary second king, and more to the point, the religious institutions prompted by his muse-consort Egeria. For Byron on Numa and Egeria, see in <i>Childe Harold</i> 4 (114 ff.). For Jewsbury on Hemans and Egeria, see Ellen Peel and Nanora Sweet, "Corinne and the Woman as Poet in England: Hemans, Jewsbury, and Barrett Browning," <em>The Novel's Seductions: Sta&#235;l's</em> Corinne <em>in Critical Inquiry</em> (Lewisburg: Bucknell U P, 1999), 211-14; and W. M. Rossetti, "Prefatory Notice," <em>The Poetical Works of Mrs. Hemans</em> (London: Moxon, 1873; etc.), 22-23. I further supplement Hemans's scepticism with paganism, her history with legend, in "Hemans, Heber, and <em>Superstition and Revelation</em>: Experiment and Orthodoxy at the Scene of Writing," <i>Romantic Passions</i>, ed. Elizabeth Fay; Romantic Praxis Series, website Romantic Circles; March 1998. <br/></p>
<p> <strong><a name="n39"> </a>39.</strong> In a passage Hemans may or may not have read, Gibbon devotes his scepticism to the Holy War of the Crusades, which he sees as the natural result of institutionalized penance spilling over into nihilism: "the guilt of adultery was multiplied by daily repetition" in confession and penitence, "that of homicide might involve the massacre of a whole people" in the "more honorable mode of satisfaction" of "military service against the Saracens": <em>The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</em>, ed. H. H. Milman, 6 vols., (New York: Harper, 1862) 5.547-49. <br/></p>
<p> <a name="n40"> </a><strong>40.</strong> To vary the title of Alain Renais's post-Revolutionary film <em>La Guerre Est Finie</em> (1965). <br/></p>
<p> <a name="n41"> </a><strong>41.</strong> For the opposite view, that "[v]igorous passion and inspiration were antithetical qualities to Hemans's poetry," see the Furr dissertation (80). Furr's opinion harks back to mid-twentieth-century opinion epitomized in Ian Jack's <em>English Literature, 1815-1832</em> (1963), who found a "low pulse" in Hemans's work: See Wolfson <em>Felicia Hemans</em> xiv-xv on Jack. <br/></p>
</body>
</html></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31535">Electronic Editions</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/editions/sceptic/index.html">The Sceptic; A Poem: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/sweet-nanora">Sweet, Nanora</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/percy-bysshe-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/704" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hume</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1531" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peterloo Massacre</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1759" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">skepticism</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1774" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gibbon</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2736" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Quarterly Review</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4706" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Sceptic</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4707" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Manfred</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4708" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Childe Harold&#039;s Pilgrimage</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4709" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">woman poet</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4710" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Murray</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4711" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sceptic</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4712" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">skeptic</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4713" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sceptical</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4714" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Common Sense</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4715" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Forest Sanctuary</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4716" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Domestic Affections</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4717" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">poetic femininity</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4718" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">bluestocking</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4719" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">heterodoxy</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4720" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">epideictic</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4721" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">didactic</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4722" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Walker</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4723" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bossuet</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4724" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">1819</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4725" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">life after death</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-52 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Section:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/section/editions/the-sceptic-a-hemans-byron-dialogue" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-organization-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Organization:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/organization/royal-society-of-literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Royal Society of Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/thomas-moore" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Moore</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-taylor-coleridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Taylor Coleridge</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/susan-wolfson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Wolfson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/peter-trinder" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peter Trinder</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-murray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Murray</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/chad-l-edgar" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Chad L. Edgar</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/felicia-dorothea-hemans" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Felicia Dorothea Hemans</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/arthur-hemans" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arthur Hemans</a></li></ul></section>Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:14:58 +0000rc-admin17275 at http://www.rc.umd.eduAbout This Hypertexthttp://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/sceptic/about.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2004-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2004</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div align="center">
<h2>About This Hypertext</h2>
<span class="smmenu"><a href="#editors">editors</a> | <a href="#contributors">contributors</a> | <a href="#acknowledgements">acknowledgements</a> | <a href="#text">text</a> | <a href="#images">images</a> | <a href="#design">design</a></span></div>
<div align="center">
<hr size="1"/></div>
<h3><b><a name="editors"> </a></b>The Editors</h3>
<p><i>Nanora Sweet</i> is a member of the English Department and Institute for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has published essays concerning Hemans in <i>At the Limits of Romanticism</i>, <i>The Lessons of Romanticism</i>, <i>Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period</i>, <i>The Novel's Seductions: Sta&#235;l's Corinne in Critical Inquiry</i>, and the <i>European Romantic Review</i> and contributed entries on Hemans to new editions of the <i>Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature</i> and the <i>Dictionary of National Biography</i>. She has co-edited the essay collection <i>Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</i> for Palgrave in 2001.</p>
<p><i>Barbara Taylor</i> completed her doctoral research project, <i>Felicia Hemans: The Making of a Professional Poet</i>, in 1998. Her essay on Felicia Hemans and the Royal Society of Literature, "The Search for a Space," appears in <i>Felicia Hemans: Re-Imagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century</i> (2001).</p>
<a href="#top" class="smalltext">top of page</a>
<h3><b><a name="contributors"> </a></b> The Contributors</h3>
<p><i>Andrew Elfenbein</i> is Professor of English at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is the author of <i>Byron and the Victorians</i> (1995) and <i>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</i> (1999) and is currently working on a project about queer family structures.</p>
<p><i>Anne Hartman</i> has recently completed doctoral research on discourses of confession in the early nineteenth century at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has co-edited a scholarly edition of Dinah Craik, and is working on a bibliography of nineteenth-century women poets for <i>Annotated Bibliography for English Studies</i>.</p>
<span class="smalltext"><a href="#top">top of page</a></span>
<b><a name="acknowledgements"> </a></b>
<h3>Acknowledgements</h3>
<p>This edition is the result of a cross Atlantic collaboration originally instigated by Adriana Craciun as part of the work of the University of Nottingham Centre for Byron Studies and we would like to thank her for her help and support. We would also like to thank Sanjiv Patel of the University of Nottingham's Learning Group for all his work and patience in designing the original site (and Ben Pekkanen and Kate Singer for transforming it for Romantic Circles). We have benefited from technical help from both sides of the Atlantic; in Nottingham from John Walsh and Rosa Talbut in the Study Support Centre and from the University of Missouri-St. Louis both Jennifer Spearman-Simms and Teri Vogler in the Faculty Resource Center. We also thank Virginia Murray for permission to include the letters of Felicia Hemans and Lord Byron. These letters are property of the Murray Archive, London.</p>
<a href="#top" class="smalltext">top of page</a>
<b><a name="text"> </a></b>
<h3>The Text</h3>
<p>This edition presents and excavates the text and context of Felicia Hemans's 1820 pamphlet-poem <i>The Sceptic</i>. Neglected by the poet's current editors, <i>The Sceptic</i> places Hemans in direct contention with Byron over belief in an afterlife in a time of uncertainty for both poets. The edition includes letters, reviews, poems, and images. A set of critical essays by Anne Hartman and Andrew Elfenbein and editors Barbara Taylor and Nanora Sweet probe Hemans's work for its engagement with Byron, allusions to topics of the day (from Peterloo to scientific debate in the <i>Quarterly Review</i>), exploitation of a poetry of praise and blame shared with Byron, and negotiation of gender through poetic style and philosophical argument.</p>
<a href="#top" class="smalltext">top of page</a>
<h3><b><a name="images"> </a></b> <b>The Images</b></h3>
<p>The portrait of Felicia Hemans was painted by William Edward West in 1827 and is used with permission of the May Somerville family. This edition also presents a <a href="/editions/sceptic/gallery.html">Gallery</a> of paintings from Nottingham City Museums, engravings of Hemans and Byron as well as original photographs of Newstead Abbey and memorials to both Hemans and Bryon taken by editor Nanora Sweet.</p>
<a href="#top" class="smalltext">top of page</a>
<b><a name="design"> </a></b>
<h3><b>The Design</b></h3>
<p>This hypertext edition was designed and marked up at the University of Maryland by Ben Pekkanen and <a href="mailto:ksinger@wam.umd.edu">Kate Singer</a>, Site Managers at Romantic Circles. Making extensive use of tables and style sheets for layout and presentation, it will work best when viewed with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator versions 5.0 and 4.7, respectively, and higher. The HTML markup is HTML 4.01/Transitional compliant, as set out by the <a href="http://www.w3c.org/">World Wide Web Consortium</a>.</p>
<a href="#top" class="smalltext">top of page</a></td>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31535">Electronic Editions</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/editions/sceptic/index.html">The Sceptic; A Poem: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/percy-bysshe-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/704" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hume</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1531" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peterloo Massacre</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1759" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">skepticism</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1774" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gibbon</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2736" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Quarterly Review</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4706" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Sceptic</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4707" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Manfred</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4708" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Childe Harold&#039;s Pilgrimage</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4709" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">woman poet</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4710" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Murray</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4711" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sceptic</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4712" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">skeptic</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4713" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sceptical</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4714" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Common Sense</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4715" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Forest Sanctuary</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4716" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Domestic Affections</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4717" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">poetic femininity</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4718" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">bluestocking</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4719" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">heterodoxy</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4720" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">epideictic</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4721" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">didactic</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4722" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Walker</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4723" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bossuet</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4724" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">1819</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4725" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">life after death</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-52 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Section:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/section/editions/the-sceptic-a-hemans-byron-dialogue" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-organization-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Organization:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/organization/royal-society-of-literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Royal Society of Literature</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/organization/university-of-missouri-st-louis" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">University of Missouri-St. Louis</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/organization/institute-for-women" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Institute for Women</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/organization/english-department" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">English Department</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/organization/university-of-minnesota" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">University of Minnesota</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/organization/university-of-london" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">University of London</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/felicia-dorothea-hemans" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Felicia Dorothea Hemans</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/anne-hartman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anne Hartman</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/nanora-sweet" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nanora Sweet</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/barbara-taylor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Barbara Taylor</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/missouri" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Missouri</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/minnesota" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Minnesota</a></li></ul></section>Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:13:06 +0000rc-admin17267 at http://www.rc.umd.eduNASSR '94http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/confarchive/nassr94.html
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><center>
<h2>NASSR Annual Conventions, 1993-1999</h2>
</center>
<div align="center">Note: The formatting of the following program follows the original. We have made only minor changes throughout, correcting obvious errors and making some listings more uniform to facilitate electronic searching.</div>
<br/></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<p align="center">The Political and Aesthetic Education of Romanticism</p>
<p align="center"><strong>2nd Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism</strong></p>
<p align="center"><strong>10-13 November 1994</strong></p>
<p align="center"><strong>Duke University, Durham, North Carolina</strong></p>
<p align="center"><strong>Preliminary Programme (as published in the <em>NASSR Newsletter</em> [Fall 1994])</strong></p>
<hr/>
<p align="center"><a name="top" id="top"> </a><strong>Go to schedule for <a href="#Thursday">Thursday</a> | <a href="#Friday">Friday</a> | <a href="#Saturday">Saturday</a> | <a href="#Sunday">Sunday</a></strong></p>
<hr/>
<p><a name="Thursday" id="Thursday"> </a>Thursday, November 10</p>
<p><strong>10:00-11:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Uneducated Poets" (special session organized by Alan Richardson, Boston C)</strong><br/>
"The Untutored Muse" <em>(Alan Richardson)</em><br/>
"'Children o' the Soil': Peasant Poetry and Organic Nationalism" <em>(Scott McEathron, U of Southern Illinois)</em><br/>
"Romantic Ideology and the 'Natural Genius': Women Poets, Anthologies, and the Production of Poetic History in the 1790s" <em>(Laura Mandell, Miami U)</em><br/>
"No Advantages of Education: John Clare's Vulgarity of Language" <em>(James McKusick, U of Maryland Baltimore County)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Schiller: Aesthetics and Politics" (Chair: Michael Morton, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Aesthetics and Politics from Benjamin to Schiller:&#160; Rethinking the Aesthetic State" <em>(Jonathan M. Hess, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)</em><br/>
"Romanticism, <em>Bildung</em>, and the 'Literary Absolute'" <em>(Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate School)</em><br/>
"Schiller's Political Aesthetics: The Refinement of Liberal Democratic Man" <em>(Michael Valdez Moses, Duke U)</em><br/>
"The Critique of Aesthetic Ideology: Radical Democracy and Friedrich Schiller's <em>On the Aesthetic Education of Man</em>" <em>(Jacqueline LeBlanc, U of Massachussetts)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romanticism and the Homoerotic" (Chair: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"'My very touch were to be infectious': Godwin's <em>Caleb Williams</em> and Homoerotic Panic" <em>(Ranita Chatterjee, U of Western Ontario)</em><br/>
"Byron's Homo-Narcissism: or 'Heathcliff, I <em>am</em> Nellie'" <em>(Steven Bruhm, Mount St. Vincent U)</em><br/>
"Sexual Pedagogies and the Lesbian Body in 'Christabel'" <em>(Andrew Elfenbein, U of Minnesota)</em><br/>
"Sappho, Sexuality, and the Romantic Sublime" <em>(Sharon Setzer, North Carolina State U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Sexual and Political Instruction in the Work of Mary Shelley" (Chair: Jeanne Moskal, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)</strong><br/>
"Learning to Curse: Translation, Rape, and Instruction in Mary Shelley's <em>Proserpine</em>" <em>(Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern U)</em><br/>
"Women and Education in Mary Shelley's <em>Lodore</em>" <em>(Ann M. Frank Wake, Elmhurst College)</em><br/>
"Ghostly Pedagogies: Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and the Writing of Poetic Identity" <em>(Ghislaine McDayter, Duke U)</em><br/>
"'The god undeified': <em>Valperga</em> and the Education of Romantic Subjects" <em>(Daniel E. White, U of Pennsylvania)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>1:15-3:00</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Scenes of Instruction in Blake" (Chair: Paul Yoder, U of Arkansas-Little Rock)</strong><br/>
"Blake's <em>Songs</em>: Of Instruction and Its Experience" <em>(Nelson Hilton, U of Georgia-Athens)</em><br/>
"(Con)(In)structing Albion: Blake, Gender, and Politics: 1792-95" <em>(Catherine McClenahan, U of St. Thomas)</em><br/>
"Righting Albion: Blake's Canon Revision" <em>(Paul Yoder)</em><br/>
"Late Kant, Middle Blake: Toward a Theory of Blake's Political Education" <em>(Steven Goldsmith, U of California-Berkeley)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Darstellung and the Lessons of Post-Structuralism" (Chair: James Rolleston, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"The Crisis of Representation in Romanticism: Romantic <em>Darstellung</em> and Poststructuralist Critical Theory" <em>(Irena Nikolova, U of Western Ontario)</em><br/>
"Postfacing the Preface in Coleridge" <em>(Sophie Thomas, Oxford U)</em><br/>
"Rhetorical Pragmatism: Jeremy Bentham and the Predictability of Fiction" <em>(Peter Roman Babiak, York U)</em><br/>
"The Romantic Object of Beauty and the Suppression of Art" <em>(Laura Claridge, US Naval Academy)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Victorian Receptions of Romanticism" (Chair: Clyde de L. Ryals, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"'Useful herbs to take the place of weeds': The Politics of Wordsworth's Victorian Reception" <em>(Gary Harrison, U of New Mexico)</em><br/>
"Feminizing Romanticism: Tennyson's Embowered Maidens and Morbid Poets" <em>(Alice Fasano, New York U)</em><br/>
"Romanticism Theorized: <em>Sartor Resartus</em> Revisited" <em>(Nigel Alderman, Duke U)</em><br/>
"Suffering Meter: Swinburne and the Sapphic Scene of Instruction" <em>(Yopie Prins, U of Michigan)</em></p>
<p><strong>"The Education of John Keats" (Chair: Marilyn Gaull, New York U)</strong><br/>
"'A Cockney Schoolroom': Keats and the Modern Academy" <em>(Nicholas Roe, U of St. Andrews)</em><br/>
"Keats in the Cockney School: An Aesthetic and Political Education" <em>(Jeffrey Cox, Texas A &amp; M)</em><br/>
"Aesthetic Education in the Public Sphere: Haydon, Hazlitt, and Keats's Elgin Marbles Sonnets" <em>(John Kandl, New York U)</em><br/>
"Romanticism and the Education of Psychoanalysis: Keats and (<em>The Fall of</em>) <em>Hyperion</em>" <em>(Joel Faflak, U of Western Ontario)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>3:30-5:30</strong> FIRST PLENARY DISCUSSION</p>
<p>Welcome: Robert F. Gleckner, Thomas Pfau (Duke U)</p>
<p>"Virtual Ekphrasis: Scott's World Picture" Jrome Christensen (English, Johns Hopkins U)</p>
<p>"Gendering the Soul," Susan Wolfson (English, Princeton U)</p>
<p>Respondent: Peter J. Manning (U of Southern California)</p>
<p align="right"><a href="#top">back to top</a></p>
<hr/>
<p><a name="Friday" id="Friday"> </a>Friday, November 11</p>
<p><strong>8:45-10:30</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Coleridge and the Political Education of Criticism" (special session organized by James McKusick, U of Maryland-Baltimore County)</strong><br/>
"Transitions: The 'Logic' of the 'Wildest Odes'" <em>(Heather J. Jackson, U of Toronto)</em><br/>
"<em>Friend</em>ly Instruction: Coleridge and the Configuration of Social Knowledge" <em>(Regina Hewitt, U of South Florida)</em><br/>
"The Genius of Failure, the Masquerade of Fame: Coleridge's Sociology of Literature in the <em>Biographia Literaria</em>" <em>(Adrienne Donald, Princeton U)</em><br/>
"Coleridge's Unfinished Aesthetic Education: Coleridge, Schiller on Culture and the State" <em>(David Aram Kaiser, U of Kentucky)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romanticism, Education, and the History of Science" (special session organized by James K. Chandler, U of Chicago)</strong><br/>
"Knowing Nature: Science, Romanticism, and the Empire of the External World" <em>(Laura Doyle, Harvard U)</em><br/>
"Coleridge, Shelley, and Science's Millennium" <em>(Mark Kipperman, Northern Illinois U)</em><br/>
"The Body which Speaks to the Body: Pedagogies of Human Influence in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" <em>(Alison Winter, California Institute of Technology)</em><br/>
"<em>Frankenstein</em>: Specifying the Limits of Pedagogy" <em>(Maureen McLane, U of Chicago)</em></p>
<p><strong>"British Romantic Fiction: Gender and History" (Chair: Susan Thorne, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Courting Ruin: The Economic Romances of Frances Burney" <em>(Miranda Burgess, Boston U)</em><br/>
"Falling into Quotation: <em>Persuasion</em> and the Fall of Woman" <em>(John Morillo, North Carolina State U)</em><br/>
"Historical Fiction as Pedagogy: Scott's Travelling Education and an Approach to Romantic Historicism in the Novel" <em>(Richard Maxwell, Valparaiso U)</em><br/>
"Scott's Authorised Version: From Waverley Romance to <em>Magnum Opus</em> Historical Truth" <em>(Clare Simmons, Ohio State U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Was (or is) There an Identity We Can Call 'Romanticism'?" I (a special session organized by Jerrold E. Hogle, U of Arizona)</strong><br/>
Introduction: "The Question of One 'Romanticism.'" (J. Hogle)<br/>
"Romantic Identity and the Community of Sentiment" <em>(Stephen C. Behrendt, U of Nebraska-Lincoln)</em><br/>
"The 'Myth' of Romanticism and the Idea of Community" <em>(Celeste Langan, UC-Berkeley)</em><br/>
"I don't believe in Romanticism (The University does it for me)" <em>(John Rieder, U of Hawaii-Manoa)</em><br/>
Respondent: Marshall Brown (U of Washington)</p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>11:00-12:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Politics, Epistemology, and Rhetoric in Shelley" (Chair: Eric Walker, Florida State U)</strong><br/>
"Tutelary Bureaucracies: Compelling the Civic Conscience in <em>Prometheus Unbound</em> and <em>The Cenci</em>" <em>(Michael Kohler, Johns Hopkins U)</em><br/>
"Unteachable Learning: On the Parting of Poetry and Madness in Shelley's <em>Julian and Maddalo</em>" <em>(Silke-Maria Weineck, U of Pennsylvania)</em><br/>
"Art, Nature, and Analogical Inference in Shelley's 'Mont Blanc'" <em>(Michael Vicario, Penn State U)</em><br/>
"The Empress's New Mind: Shelley's <em>The Witch of Atlas</em> as the Scene of Instruction" <em>(Arkady Plotnitsky, U of Pennsylvania)</em></p>
<p><strong>"The Romantic Body: Between Sustenance and Pathology" (Chair: Anne K. Mellor, UCLA)</strong><br/>
"The Nurse's Tale: The Fostering System as National and Imperial Education" <em>(Katie Trumpener, U of Chicago)</em><br/>
"Educating Mothers to be Mothers: Romanticism and the Maternal Breastfeeding Controversy" <em>(Julie Costello, U of Notre Dame)</em><br/>
"John Brown's Medical Romanticism" <em>(Martin Wallen, U of Oklahoma)</em><br/>
"Confessing the Body: Lamb on Drunkenness, Hazlitt on Sex" <em>(Bonnie Woodberg, Florida State U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Models of Aesthetic and Political Instruction in Godwin, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt" (Chair: Nicholas Roe, U of St. Andrews)</strong><br/>
"'Of Deception and Frankness': Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and the Jacobin Response to <em>Emile</em>" <em>(Gary Handwerk, U of Washington)</em><br/>
"The man, whose eye / Is ever on himself': The Ideological Function of Aesthetic Self- Surveillance in Bell, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth" <em>(Thomas Pfau, Duke U)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth and the Great Wheel of Education" <em>(Alison Hickey, Wellesley C)</em><br/>
"Interest and Imagination: Hazlitt's <em>Essay on the Principles of Human Action</em>" <em>(Deborah Elise White, Columbia U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Marketing Romantic Music: The Age of Lost Innocence" (special session organized by James Deaville, Music, McMaster U)</strong><br/>
"Creating a Musical Public and Constructing Musical Modernism: The New-German School and the Euterpe Concerts in Leipzig" <em>(James Deaville)</em><br/>
"Piano Arrangements in the Nineteenth Century: Marketing/Domesticating/Canonizing" <em>(James Parakilas, Bates C)</em><br/>
"Re-Educating the 'Classical' Public: "The Romantic Revival and the Contemporary American Musical Scene" <em>(Michael Saffle, Virginia Tech. U)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>2:00-3:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Was (or is) There an Identity We Can Call 'Romanticism'?" II (special session organized by Jerrold E. Hogle, U of Arizona)</strong><br/>
"Introduction: The Defence of Romanticism" <em>(Jerrold Hogle)</em><br/>
"What Happens When Jane Austen and Fanny Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?" <em>(William Galperin, Rutgers U)</em><br/>
"Romanticism, Coleridge, and the Hermeneutics of the Ethical Sublime" <em>(David Haney, Auburn U)</em><br/>
"The Survival of Romanticism: Poets and Poetics Since the Early Nineteenth Century" <em>(Jeffrey Robinson, U of Colorado-Boulder)</em><br/>
Respondent: Jean Hall (Cal. State U--Fullerton)</p>
<p><strong>"Educating the Eye: Visual Arts and Exhibitions" (Chair: John L. Sharpe, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Teaching Discipline: Sketching and Drawing Manuals in British Romanticism" <em>(Richard Sha, American U)</em><br/>
"Blake and the Aesthetics of the Sketch" <em>(Joseph Viscomi, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)</em><br/>
"Aesthetic Education in Blake's Illustrations to Young's <em>Night Thoughts</em>" <em>(Grant Scott, Muhlenberg C)</em><br/>
"Romantic Exhibition and the Rise of the Viewing Public"<em>(C. S. Matheson, U of Windsor)</em></p>
<p><strong>"The Contours of a Feminine Romanticism" (Chair: Stuart Curran, U of Pennsylvania)</strong><br/>
"Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth: 'Dark Forgetfulness' and 'The Intercession of Saint Monica'" <em>(Kari Lokke, U of California-Davis)</em><br/>
"An Education in Stereotypes: Hemans's 'Red Indians'" <em>(Nancy Moore Goslee, U of Tennessee-Knoxville)</em><br/>
"Anna Seward's Arcadian Voice: Finding a Place in Darwin's Botanical Garden" <em>(Elizabeth Fay, U of Massachusetts-Boston)</em><br/>
"Realizing a Romantic Pedagogy: Romantic Women Writers and the Romance of Real Life" <em>(Michael Gamer, U of Pennsylvania)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Irony, Individuality, and Aesthetic Strategy in German Romanticism" (Chair: Paul Cantor, U of Virginia)</strong><br/>
"The Politics of <em>Individualitt</em> in Schlegel, Novalis, and Hlderlin" <em>(Gerald N. Izenberg, Washington U)</em><br/>
"Productive Rupture: the Discreet Irony of an Aesthetic Education in Kleist's <em>ber das Marionettentheater</em>" <em>(Anthony Reynolds, New York U)</em><br/>
"Reading the Book of Nature in E. T. A. Hoffmann" <em>(David Vandenberg, Emory &amp; Henry C)</em><br/>
"The Power of Music and/or the Power of Words" <em>(Ulrich Schnherr, Columbia U)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>4:15-6:15</strong> SECOND PLENARY DISCUSSION</p>
<p>"The 'Inhibitions of Democracy' on Romantic Political Thought: Thoreau's Democratic Individualism," Nancy Rosenblum (Political Science, Brown U)</p>
<p>"The Doubled Consciousness of Early Capitalist Culture," Steven Watts (History, U of Missouri-Columbia)</p>
<p>Respondents: Cathy Davidson (English, Duke U) &amp; Michael Gillespie (Political Science, Duke U)</p>
<p align="right"><a href="#top">back to top</a></p>
<hr/>
<p><a name="Saturday" id="Saturday"> </a>Saturday, November 12</p>
<p><strong>8:45-10:30</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Aesthetic Valuation and Social Process: the Reviewers Reviewed" (Chair: John Kandl, New York U)</strong><br/>
"The Pedagogy of Enlightened, Radical, and Romantic Readers: An Example from John Thelwall" <em>(Michael Scrivener, Wayne State U)</em><br/>
"Making the Romantic Ideology: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the <em>Wat Tyler</em> Affair" <em>(Robert K. Lapp, Dalhousie U)</em><br/>
"Rape, Patricide, and Execution: A Play on Violence" <em>(Young-ok An, U of Southern California)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Language, Theory: Implicating the Political" (special session organized by Carol Jacobs, SUNY-Buffalo)</strong><br/>
"The 'End of Art' in Friedrich Hlderlin's 'Stimme Des Volkes'" <em>(Eva Geulen, U of Rochester)</em><br/>
"The Sublime of the Nation and the German Question" <em>(Ian Balfour, York U)</em><br/>
"<em>Res publica</em>: Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Schlegel, and 'Political Romanticism'" <em>(Matthew Hartman, Johns Hopkins U)</em><br/>
"The Force of the Positive: The Hyperions of Keats and Marx" <em>(Tom McCall, U of Houston)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Women Poets and the Romantic Aesthetic" (special session organized by Stephen C. Behrendt, U of Nebraska-Lincoln and Harriet Kramer Linkin, New Mexico State U)</strong><br/>
"Women and Della Cruscanism, Women and Romanticism" <em>(Judith Pascoe, U of Iowa)</em><br/>
"The Merging of Public and Private: Charlotte Smith's <em>Beachy Head</em>" <em>(Kay Cook, Southern Utah U)</em><br/>
"Staging History: Catherine Macaulay, Joanna Baillie, and Felicia Hemans" <em>(Greg Kucich, U of Notre Dame)</em><br/>
"One Sings, the Other Doesn't: Letitia Landon and Mary Tighe, or How Women Poets Image the Romantic Aesthetic" <em>(Harriet Kramer Linkin)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Shakespeare and the Scene of Romantic Literary Instruction" (special session organized by Charles Mahoney, U of Connecticut-Storrs)</strong><br/>
"Savoyard Shakespeare: Wordsworth in the Hills of Paris" <em>(Reeve Parker, Cornell U)</em><br/>
"Master Betty Masters Shakespeare: Managing the Queer Character of Youth" <em>(Julie Carlson, U of California-Santa Barbara)</em><br/>
"Patrolling the Bard: Hazlitt, <em>Coriolanus</em>, and Romantic Apostasy" <em>(Charles Mahoney)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>11:00-12:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Music and Culture in French and German Romanticism" (special session organized by Jeffrey Kallberg, U of Pennsylvania)</strong><br/>
"Some Romantic Images in Beethoven" <em>(Maynard Solomon, New York)</em><br/>
"Practicing Music and the Practice of Sex : Sex and Music in French Romantic Discourse" <em>(Jeffrey Kallberg)</em><br/>
"Romantic Music under Siege in 1848" <em>(Sanna Pederson, U of Pennsylvania)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Education, Romantic Aesthetics, and the Denial of Rhetoric" (special session organized by David Ferris, Queens College &amp; CUNY Graduate Center)</strong><br/>
"Rhetoric and Denial on Keats's Urn" <em>(David Ferris)</em><br/>
"Poetic Education: Shelley's 'Defence' and the Crisis in Romanticism" <em>(Roger Blood, Yale U)</em><br/>
"Language and the 'Body Politic'" <em>(Claudia Brodsky-Lacour, Princeton U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"From Picturesque to the Sublime: The Cognitive Structure of the Romantic Image" (Chair: Annette Wheeler Cafarelli)</strong><br/>
"Jane Austen and the Picturesque: Aesthetic Instruction and Romantic Epistemology" <em>(Jill Heydt-Stevenson, U of Texas-San Antonio)</em><br/>
"The Lessons of <em>Imitatio Christi</em> and <em>Imitatio Naturae</em> in the Work of Caspar David Friedrich" <em>(Hillary A. Braysmith, U of Southern Indiana)</em><br/>
"The Political Aesthetic of Adam Mller and Caspar David Friedrich's Landscape Painting" <em>(Peter Foley, U of Arizona)</em><br/>
"'Sur les paules d'un pauvre esclave': Salvation, sperance, and Equality in Gricault's <em>Raft of Medusa</em>" <em>(Albert Alhadeff, U of Colorado-Boulder)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Pastoralism, Eroticism, Enlightenment, and Geometry in Wordsworth's <em>Prelude</em>" (Chair: Judith W. Page, Millsaps C)</strong><br/>
"Teaching the 'Art of Seeing': Pastoral Vestiges in Thomson and Wordsworth" <em>(Kevis Goodman, Yale U)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth's Nationalist Geometry" <em>(William Jewett, Yale U)</em><br/>
"Soldier Boys and Male Romantic Poets" <em>(James Holt McGavran, U of North Carolina-Charlotte)</em><br/>
"'The light of circumstances, flash'd / Upon an independent intellect': Education and Progression in <em>The Prelude</em>" <em>(David Garcia, Cornell U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Re-mapping Romanticism: Of Domestic and Oriental Subjects" (Chair: John Waters, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Reading Habits: Scenes of Miseducation in the Romantic Line" <em>(Marlon Ross, U of Michigan)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth's Aesthetic Appropriation of Nature: A Problematic Step Toward Eco- ideology" <em>(Martha Bohrer, Miami U)</em><br/>
"Eastern Non-Dualism and the Sublime in Late Eighteenth-Century English Poetry" <em>(Kathryn Freeman, U of Miami)</em><br/>
"Theory and History in Romantic Orientalism and Romantic Studies" <em>(Susan B. Taylor, U of Colorado-Colorado Springs)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>2:00-3:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Reverse Instruction: Romanticism and Postmodernism" (Chair: Timothy Morton, New York U)</strong><br/>
"Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley's <em>Defence</em> of Adorno" <em>(Robert Kaufman, U of California-Berkeley)</em><br/>
"Educating Postmodernism: or, Reading Backwards from Postmodern Fiction to John Clare" <em>(Theresa M. Kelley, U of Texas-Austin)</em><br/>
"Fantastic Modernity, Fantastic Reflexivities: Keats, Jameson, and the Postmodern Urn" <em>(Orrin Wang, U of Maryland at College Park)</em><br/>
"Imitating Silence: Byron, Hood, Poe, and Campion" <em>(Carol Jacobs, SUNY-Buffalo)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Politics and Ireland: The Edgeworths" (Chair: Nigel Alderman, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"The Edgeworths and the Interests of Education" <em>(Mark Canuel, Johns Hopkins U)</em><br/>
"Maria Edgeworth: Teacher and Critic" <em>(Francis Botkin, U of Illinois-Chicago)</em><br/>
"'His eyes upon us': The Lesson of the Informer in Edgeworth's 'Lame Jervas'" <em>(Julia M. Wright, Concordia, Montreal)</em><br/>
"'The Little Remnant': Alterity, Femininity, and the National Tale" <em>(Ina Ferris, U of Ottawa)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Uneducated Poets: Expanding the Canon" (Chair: Scott McEathron, U of Southern Illinois)</strong><br/>
"Theoretical Conditions of the Expansion of the Romantic Poetic Canon" <em>(John Waters, Duke U)</em><br/>
"Lubin's Literacy: John Clare and the Possibilities of the Peasant Poet" <em>(Bridget Keegan, Samford U)</em><br/>
"Patronage and the Peasant-Poet in the early Romantic Period: Theorizing the Beginnings of Ann Yearsley, Robert Bloomfield, and Felicia Hemans" <em>(Chad Edgar, New York U)</em><br/>
"The Ghosts of Competing Literacies in John Clare's <em>Autobiography</em>" <em>(Richard Swartz, U of Southern Maine)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Theorizing Romantic Drama" (Chair: Robert F. Gleckner, Duke U)</strong><br/>
"Joanna Baillie's Poetic Aesthetic: Passion and 'the plain order of things'" <em>(Catherine Burroughs, Cornell C)</em><br/>
"Liberal Self-Fashioning in Shelley's <em>Cenci</em>" <em>(Linda Brigham, Kansas State U)</em><br/>
"Byron as a Teacher of the Barred Subject: <em>Manfred</em> and the Ethics of Desire" <em>(Sinkwan Cheng, State U of New York-Buffalo)</em></p>
<p><strong>"The Teachings of Nature in German Romanticism" (special session organized by Alice Kuzniar, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)</strong><br/>
"'<em>Voran leuchtest du.'</em> What Kepler Taught the Romantics About Nature" <em>(Nicholas Halmi, U of Toronto)</em><br/>
"Towards a Mystical Physics: An Aspect of Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of <em>Universalpoesie</em>" <em>(Paola Mayer, U of Toronto)</em><br/>
"On Being the 'Last Kantian in Nazi Germany': Dwelling with Animals after Schelling" <em>(David Clark, McMaster U)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>4:15-6:15</strong> THIRD PLENARY DISCUSSION</p>
<p>Alan Liu (U of California-Santa Barbara)</p>
<p>Respondents: Cynthia Chase (English, Cornell U) &amp; William Reddy (Duke U)</p>
<p align="right"><a href="#top">back to top</a></p>
<hr/>
<p><a name="Sunday" id="Sunday"> </a>Sunday, November 13</p>
<p><strong>8:45-10:30</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"Teaching Violence in Romanticism" (special session organized by Mary A. Favret, Indiana U)</strong><br/>
"Teaching Byron's <em>Giaour</em> as Riddle and Message" <em>(Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, UCLA)</em><br/>
"'Rouzing the Faculties to Act': Blake's Scenes of (Violent) Instruction" <em>(Nicholas Williams, Indiana U)</em><br/>
"Learning What Hurts: 'The School-Mistress,' the Rod, and the Poem" <em>(Adela Pinch, U of Michigan)</em><br/>
"Radical Poetry 101: Wordsworth and Contemporary Lyrics of Resistance" <em>(Jonathan Barron, U of North Carolina-Charlotte)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romantic Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Academy" (Chair: Jerome McGann, U of Virginia)</strong><br/>
"Poetry and the Law: the Poet as Legislator in Shelley and Rousseau" <em>(Lorrie Clark, Trent U)</em><br/>
"The Political Economy of Aesthetic Consumption" <em>(Margaret Russett, U of Southern California)</em><br/>
"Shelley's Unhumanizing Pedagogy" <em>(Paul Youngquist, Pennsylvania State U)</em><br/>
"Genius School: Coleridge, Schiller, and the Productionist Aesthetic" <em>(Kathleen Dillon, Temple U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romantic Knowledge: Institutions of Production and Pedagogy" (Chair: Rhonda Ray Kercsmar)</strong><br/>
"Institutions of Romanticism: An International Perspective" <em>(Clifford Siskin, SUNY-Stony Brook, and Philip Martin, Cheltenham &amp; Gloucester College)</em><br/>
"Can We Teach Romanticism to an Unromantic Generation" <em>(Debbie Lee, U of Arizona)</em><br/>
"Between Irony and Radicalism: the Other Way of a Romantic Education" <em>(Karen Weisman, U of Waterloo)</em><br/>
"A Histrionic Romantics Classroom" <em>(Thomas Crochunis, Rutgers U)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romanticism in Canada" (special session organized by Tilottama Rajan, U of Western Ontario)</strong><br/>
"Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill" <em>(Carole Gerson, Simon Fraser U)</em><br/>
"Made One with Nature: The Commemorative Odes of the Confederation Poets" <em>(D.M.R. Bentley, U of Western Ontario)</em><br/>
"Frye in Canada: Jonah in the Belly of the Whale" <em>(Ross Woodman, U of Western Ontario)</em><br/>
"European Romantic Nationalism, Colonial Nationalism, Canadian Literary Criticism" <em>(Margery Fee, U of British Columbia)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>11:00-12:45</strong> CONCURRENT PANEL SESSIONS</p>
<p><strong>"New Romantic Canons in the Same Old Classroom: A Problem-Solving Forum on Teaching" (special session organized by Morris Eaves, U of Rochester)</strong><br/>
Position papers by Laura Mandell (Miami U), Anne K. Mellor (UCLA) &amp; Richard Matlak (C of the Holy Cross), Jerome McGann (U of Virginia), and Stuart Curran (U of Pennsylvania).</p>
<p><strong>"Teaching Wordsworth's Teachings" (Chair: William Galperin, Rutgers U)</strong><br/>
"Teaching a Sheep to Talk: The Spiritual Education of Romanticism" <em>(Walter Reed, Emory U)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth and the Problem of Authority in Feminist Pedagogy" <em>(Michael Fischer, U of New Mexico)</em><br/>
"Wordsworth's 'The Thorn' and the Social Imagination" <em>(Scott Harshbarger, Hofstra U)</em><br/>
"'Strange Discipline': Aesthetic Education and Community in Wordsworth's <em>The Ruined Cottage</em>" <em>(Kurt Fosso, Westminster C)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Romantic Education as Social and Aesthetic Practice" (Chair: Richard Swartz, U of Southern Maine)</strong><br/>
"The Professionalization of Knowledge: Female Education in Middle Class Romantic Culture" <em>(Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Columbia U)</em><br/>
"Britain and the Culture of Disestablishment" <em>(Nanora Sweet, U of Missouri-St. Louis)</em><br/>
"State Education, Taste Education" <em>(Timothy Morton, New York U)</em><br/>
"Lessons of Radical Difference: Mary Shelley and the Politics of Family History" <em>(Deborah Weiner, U of Rochester)</em></p>
<p><strong>"Genres as Modes of Education" (special session organized by J. Douglas Kneale, U of Western Ontario)</strong><br/>
"Let nature be your teacher: Wordsworth and Poetical Correctness" <em>(Stephen Bretzius, Lousiana State U)</em><br/>
"The Rising Glory of America" <em>(Julie Ellison, U of Michigan)</em><br/>
"The Ambivalence of Romantic Identity: Harmony and Conflict in Self-Descriptions by Wordsworth and Byron" <em>(Jean Hall, California State U-Fullerton)</em><br/>
"Transport and Persuasion in Wordsworth" <em>(J. Douglas Kneale)</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>1:00-2:00</strong> NASSR BUSINESS MEETING</p>
<hr/>
<p align="right"><a href="#top">back to top</a></p>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<blockquote>
<hr/>
<a href="/reference/misc/confarchive/nassr.html">NASSR Annual Conventions - Main Page</a><br/>
<a href="/reference/misc/confarchive/index.html">Conference Archive</a><br/></blockquote>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr/>
<p style="font-size: 12px; font-family: arial; text-align: center"><!--end of the breadcrumb trail--> <!--beginning of fine print and footer-->
<!--end fine print and footer--></p></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31537">Scholarly Resources</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/reference/misc/confarchive/index.html">Conference Archive</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/alan-richardson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alan Richardson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/laura-mandell" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Laura Mandell</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/steven-bruhm" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Steven Bruhm</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-galperin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Galperin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/michael-valdez-moses" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Valdez Moses</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/michael-morton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Morton</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/eve-kosofsky-sedgwick" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/anne-k-mellor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anne K. Mellor</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jacqueline-leblanc" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jacqueline LeBlanc</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jerrold-e-hogle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jerrold E. Hogle</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/friedrich-schiller" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Friedrich Schiller</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-clare" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Clare</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/nicholas-roe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nicholas Roe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/marc-redfield" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Marc Redfield</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/caleb-williams" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caleb Williams</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-wordsworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Wordsworth</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jeanne-moskal" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeanne Moskal</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/nigel-alderman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nigel Alderman</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-kandl" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Kandl</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/robert-f-gleckner" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert F. Gleckner</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/thomas-pfau" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Pfau</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-m-hess" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan M. Hess</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/scott-harshbarger" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scott Harshbarger</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/mary-loeffelholz" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Loeffelholz</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/scott-mceathron" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scott McEathron</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/r-paul-yoder" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">R. Paul Yoder</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/james-c-mckusick" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James C. McKusick</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/york" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">York</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/oxford" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Oxford</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/toronto" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Toronto</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/lincoln" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lincoln</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/boston" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Boston</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/baltimore" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Baltimore</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/athens" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Athens</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/miami" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Miami</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/chicago" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Chicago</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/nebraska" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nebraska</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/ohio" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ohio</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/minnesota" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Minnesota</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/virginia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Virginia</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/southern-california" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Southern California</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/hawaii" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hawaii</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/new-york" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New York</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/washington" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Washington</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/michigan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michigan</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/missouri" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Missouri</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/new-mexico" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New Mexico</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/oklahoma" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Oklahoma</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/california" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">California</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/georgia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Georgia</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/arizona" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arizona</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/colorado" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Colorado</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/ontario" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ontario</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/texas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Texas</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/kentucky" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kentucky</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/tennessee" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tennessee</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/pennsylvania" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Pennsylvania</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/florida" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Florida</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/north-carolina" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">North Carolina</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/massachusetts" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Massachusetts</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/arkansas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arkansas</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/columbia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Columbia</a></li></ul></section>Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:18:52 +0000rc-admin23087 at http://www.rc.umd.edu"Put to the Blush": Romantic Irregularities and Sapphic Tropeshttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/lanser/lanser.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/index.html">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div id="container"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>"Put to the Blush": Romantic Irregularities and Sapphic Tropes</h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">Without arguing for direct influence, this essay reads a group of English poems as an implicit Romantic conversation that advances different models of sapphic sublimity in a troplogical contest about the nature and place of female affinities. I begin by revisiting the exclusion of 'Christabel' from the _Lyrical Ballads_; I discuss the implicit dialogue enacted through William Wordsworth&#8217;s sonnet to the 'Ladies of Llangollen' and Dorothy Wordsworth&#8217;s poem 'Irregular Verses'; and I conclude with a look at the metrical practices of these poems and of Shelley&#8217;s 'Rosalind and Helen' as a way to explore the ambivalences and ambiguities in Romantic configurations of female same-sex desire. This essay appears in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><ol><li><p>"Edleston and I have separated for the present," Byron laments from Cambridge in a letter of 1806, "and my mind is a chaos of hope and sorrow. . . . I certainly love him more than any human being, and neither time nor distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable disposition. In short, we shall put <em>Lady E. Butler</em> and <em>Miss Ponsonby</em> to the blush, <em>Pylades</em> and <em>Orestes</em> out of countenance, and want nothing but a catastrophe like <em>Nisus</em> and <em>Euryalus</em>, to give <em>Jonathan</em> and <em>David</em> the 'go by'"(30).</p></li><li><p>When Byron includes a pair of women in his mythography of friendship, he marks a new moment in the long history of same-sex bonds. By 1806 the public image of friendship had undergone something of a sex change, and Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the so-called "Ladies of Llangollen" who eloped to Wales in 1778 and lived together until Butler's death in 1829, became the first female emblem for the kind of classical friendship that early modernists such as Michel de Montaigne and Jeremy Taylor had resurrected as an affair between men. As I have written elsewhere, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries private intimacies between women became public relations: European gentlewomen appropriated the cultural capital already attached to friendship between elite men as a resource in their struggle for autonomy, authority, and class privilege (Lanser 179-98). <a href="#1">[1]</a><a name="back1"> </a></p></li><li><p>Yet notice the asymmetry of Byron's tropes. He doesn't speak of putting any of the male couples "to the blush," but imagines irritating and besting them as he flaunts his love for Edleston. Does the blush merely echo the cultural commonplace that renders men combative but women merely delicate? Do Butler and Ponsonby blush only because Byron's love would best theirs, or does the blush hint at something more than friendship between Butler and Ponsonby, as was possibly the case between Byron and Edleston? Whatever Byron's logic, his gendered tropes underscore the limits of imagining female-female relations within a male-male lineage. For when two men choose one another, patriarchy may be altered but is not overturned, but when two women do so, structures of male dominance are potentially compromised. As David Halperin reminds us, in patriarchal systems "women must submit to a system of compulsory heterosociality" in which "the dominating feature" is "the inescapability of sexual relations with men." Thus "sexual relations among women represent a perennial threat to male dominance, especially whenever such relations become exclusive and thereby take women out of circulation among men" (Halperin 78).</p></li><li><p>This threat is recognized in contemporary defenses of Butler and Ponsonby. Mary Pilkington's <em>Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters</em> (1804), for example, comments that "so completely gratified" were Butler and Ponsonby "in the society of each other, that they entertained the determination of never becoming wives." But she acknowledges that their families thought this decision "very unnatural" and that the two women had to "def[y] the opinion of the world" in order to "reside in the harmony of true friendship." Pilkington then uses Butler and Ponsonby to refute the assertion "that females are incapable of a permanent attachment" and to argue that women cannot to be "disqualified from feeling a passion which is calculated to dignify the human mind" (Pilkington 64-5). Anna Seward's heroic poem <em>Llangollen Vale</em> (1796) likewise recognizes Butler and Ponsonby's "sacred Friendship" as having been "assail[ed]" alike by "stern authorities" and "silken" efforts at "persuasion" (5).</p></li><li><p>These tributes to Butler and Ponsonby suggest that Byron's blush might stand in for both delicacy <em>and</em> defiance, characterizing exclusive female coupling at once, and paradoxically, as an epitome of virtue and a transgression of social and sexual norms. This paradox may explain why, especially during the last quarter of the century, an eruption of bawdy and satiric texts coexisted uneasily with, and could potentially undermine, idyllic representations of female friendship that seemed to be their opposite. Where friendship was a substitute rather than a supplement for marriage, and thus a transgression of the heterosexual order whether or not the relationship was itself "sexual"&#8212;and who could know?&#8212;the lines separating virtuous from transgressive alliances were often literally paper thin: a public word could make or break a reputation, especially after what Katharine Binhammer has called the 'sex panic' of the 1790s when Marie Antoinette's putative sapphism helped to pave her journey to the guillotine (409-35).</p></li><li><p>It is this light that I want to explore the place of women's erotic affiliations in the Romantic imagination and the tensions around which they get configured in Romantic verse. In the larger project from which I draw this discussion, I argue that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries female intimacies become a charged site for working out the epistemic changes of modernity. By the late eighteenth century, when Butler and Ponsonby had themselves become a charged site, the fragile lines separating chaste friendship from suspect sapphism were heavily class-inflected, favoring gentlewomen who did not transgress external codes of propriety and femininity. In the end, though, the fine lines of distinction depended on the words and images that surrounded a particular relationship and on the interpretive conventions through which these could be read.<a href="#2">[2]</a><a name="back2"> </a> As with Gestalt psychology's famous figure of the vase that is also two faces in profile, or the "ingenue" who can turn into a "hag," the alternative reading lurks&#8212;and becomes startlingly obvious once the figure-ground system is reversed though a perceptual shift. On paper, Butler and Ponsonby were thus variously celebrated (for the most part) and denigrated (privately and sometimes publicly) for a way of life that itself did not change: in 1790, for example, fully twelve years after their elopement, a newspaper story suddenly appeared mocking Butler as "masculine" and the couple as odd and implying that they had something to blush about. Not surprisingly, women like Butler and Ponsonby and defenders like Pilkington and Seward also took part in manipulating representations, in what sometimes amounted to an elaborate public relations scheme (Lanser 179-98).</p></li><li><p>I want to suggest that the transgressive potential of female friendship, with its tenuous distinction between virtuous friendship and sexual sin, urged the inscription of female intimacies into the ambiguities of figuration and hence into poetic forms. One can argue, of course, that in Romantic poetry <em>all</em> sexuality is so figured, that&#8212;to cite Stuart Curran&#8212;in Britain "there is little sex, seldom an actual body, and virtually no romance in Romanticism" ("Of Genes"). But for two somewhat contrary reasons Romantic writings may be especially important to the history of female homoeroticism. First, it is arguably the Romantic moment that spawned the modern constructions of sexual subjectivity and the attendant values of individual difference, self-fulfillment, the fatedness of attraction and the primacy of desire that have legitimated modern same-sex bonds. It is no accident that Anne Lister (1791-1840), the first Englishwoman known to have left explicit records of a self-conscious, actively sexual, and firmly homoerotic orientation, looked to Rousseau's <em>Confessions</em> and Byron's poems for the self-authorization that enabled her to see the love of women as her proper state, the "straight" path that "nature seemed to have set out" for her (qtd. in Liddington 182).</p></li><li><p>Secondly and somewhat contrarily, however, female intimacies may offer a limit case for Romantic sexual ideology. It is a commonplace that many Romantic writers were accused of libertine sexual beliefs and practices, yet (or perhaps for that reason) as Richard Sha has observed, a notion of Romantic transcendence, along with Foucauldian sexual chronologies, have also tended to erase sexuality from Romanticist scholarship (Sha). Now that scholars have begun to restore sexuality to Romanticism in the process of historicizing "Romantic ideology," it becomes important to investigate the specific contours of Romantic values about sexual forms and alliances. Andrew Elfenbein's <em>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</em> gives the most fully articulated expression of this new project when he suggests that "sexual transgression" underwrites the genius of Romantic art and that homoeroticism in particular became a way for writers to mark their superiority.<a href="#3">[3]</a><a name="back3"> </a> Elfenbein's study explores the association of sapphism with genius in Anne Damer's life, in Anne Bannerman's poetry, and in Coleridge's self-fashioning through "Christabel." Here I want to ask what we can learn about the place of sapphism in the Romantic imagination by looking at poetic tropes&#8212;that is, at the uses of language and form in "a sense other than that which is proper" to them.<a href="#4">[4]</a><a name="back4"> </a> If, as I implied above, poetic discourse is a fertile site for transmuting suppressed content into symbolic form and for inscribing the ambiguous, the contradictory, the unspeakable, then it may hold a significant place in the history of sexuality. Parsing out the poetic contours of sapphism in Romantic poetry could thus help us accomplish one piece of the history of female homosexuality that, as David Halperin recognizes in his "History of Male Homosexuality," must be pursued separately in recognition of the enormous difference patriarchy makes in the social construction of same-sex bonds.</p></li><li><p>As one contribution to such a project, I will focus here on a loosely interconnected set of poems about the nature and implications of female coupling. I'll begin by revisiting "Christabel" (1816) and its exclusion from the second edition of the <em>Lyrical Ballads</em> (1800), where it was hastily supplanted by William Wordsworth's "Michael." I'll then explore an implicit contest about female intimacies carried out in poems by two Wordsworths: an occasional sonnet published in 1827 that William composed while visiting Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby during an 1824 tour of Wales with his wife and daughter, and a longer work titled "Irregular Verses" that Dorothy began in 1826 or 1827 for the daughter of her beloved friend Jane Pollard but which was not published until 1987. Finally, I will take up a metrical figure present in "Christabel," "Irregular Verses" and Percy Shelley's "Rosalind and Helen" (1818), with a bow as well to Anne Lister's diaries. Without arguing for direct influence, I want to read these poems as an implicit Romantic conversation that advances different models of sapphic sublimity in a tropological contest about the nature and place of female affinities.</p></li><li><p>"Christabel" is, of course, the best known of these poems and also the most openly sexual. Although the encounter between Geraldine and Christabel is shrouded in mystery, the poem makes clear as much through its silences as through its images that something sapphic happens in Christabel's bed that fateful night. Both Geraldine and the scene of seduction are represented primarily through metonymy and synechdoche: we know Geraldine as a "faint and sweet" voice, as white garments and a whiter neck, bright eyes, a "bosom" and "half [a] side"; we know that both women undress and become the objects of one another's gaze; that Geraldine "had" her "will" with Christabel after a psychic struggle with Christabel's "wandering mother"; that Geraldine's "spell" becomes "lord" of Christabel's "utterance"; and that the "touch" of a "bosom" reveals a "mark" of "shame" that creates a tightness "beneath [Christabel's] heaving breasts." We know that Christabel recognizes that she has "sinn'd," but experiences only "perplexity of mind" about its occasion. Of what passes in the bed we know only that Geraldine held "the maiden in her arms" and "worked" her "harms." The scene carries images of both pleasure and danger: that it is "a sight to dream of not to tell" suggests that sapphism, though unspeakable, may also be desired.<a href="#5">[5]</a><a name="back5"> </a> Herein lies the transformation into "forbidden mystery" of which Elfenbein writes: in contrast to a text like Henry Fielding's <em>Female Husband</em> (1746), which makes sex between women only a matter "not fit to be mentioned," "Christabel" transmutes sapphic silence into the stuff of fantasy.</p></li><li><p>Elfenbein has argued persuasively that "Christabel" marks at once the culmination of eighteenth-century anti-sapphic satiric discourse and a transmutation of that discourse into a "lesbian sublime" (Elfenbein 177). But the fullness of this transmutation depends on a reader's ability to suppress the satire, and thus the referentiality, that underwrites the poem. Arguing that "the poem is virtually immune to historical allegory of the kind that has traditionally been associated with lesbianism," Elfenbein dismisses Hazlitt's and Wordsworth's readings of "Christabel" as obscene&#8212;and indeed one anonymous reviewer called the poem "the most obscene poem in the English Language"&#8212;as lapses of judgment to which "more discriminating readers" with a "finer aesthetic taste" would not succumb (Elfenbein 188,177). I would suggest, however, that literalized readings of "Christabel" point to an inability less aesthetic than social, and one encouraged by the poem's own recourse to the very tropes it seeks also to transcend. What I find transgressive about "Christabel" is the way in which it treads upon the fine line of external appearance that separates the gender-bending sapphist from the virtuous friend. By figuring both Christabel and Geraldine as beautifully feminine on the surface, the poem suggests that "surpassingly fair" women of high birth&#8212;and not only the potentially demonic Geraldine but the innocent Christabel&#8212;might be harboring homoerotic desires. When Coleridge makes Geraldine's body only half visible, he exploits and arguably plays with old fears that women who desired women were hermaphrodites, and some of Coleridge's reviewers did imagine Geraldine's hidden side as "terrible and disgusting" and "all deformity."<a href="#6">[6]</a><a name="back6"> </a> Moreover, in a perverse doubling, Geraldine seems to be exploiting lesbianism in the service of a marriage plot just as eighteenth-century "female husbands" were accused of doing when they seduced innocent young women with an aim toward marrying for wealth or rank. And at least one reviewer did fret that Geraldine's seduction of Christabel resembled "the spells of vicious example in real life" (Condor 210).</p></li><li><p>We may never know whether this anxiety about "real life" figured in the oddly belated distress "Christabel" created for one or both Wordsworths. Coleridge had written the poem's first section in 1797 and completed Part II for the second (1800) edition of <em>Lyrical Ballads</em>, for which it was to serve as the concluding poem. As biographers have reported, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in her journal on October 4, 1800, after a visit in which Coleridge apparently read the poem aloud, the subjectless sentence, "Exceedingly delighted with the 2nd part of "Christabel." Coleridge apparently read out the poem once more on October 5 and, says Dorothy, "we had increasing pleasure." Yet on the third day, the journal states without elaboration: "Determined not to print 'Christabel' with the LB" (Wordsworth, <em>Journals</em> 24-5).</p></li><li><p>Scholars have of course wondered why "Christabel" was so "suddenly and inexplicably dropped," and John Worthen has claimed that there is "very little evidence and very few facts" to justify contentiously partisan readings of this development (Eilenberg 4; Worthen 10). Richard Matlak speculates that Wordsworth had begun to recognize the need "to battle for his creative life against the remarkable gifts of originality and imitative prowess Coleridge possessed" (Matlak 82). It's most probable that in the end "Christabel" seemed too great a departure from the poetics of <em>Lyrical Ballads</em> as a whole; William did write to his publisher that the style of "Christabel" "was so discordant from my own that it could not be printed along with my poems with any propriety," though as Susan Eilenberg points out, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is surely discordant as well (qtd. in Eilenberg 10). Taking "propriety" to signify both decorum and property, Eilenberg argues that Wordsworth rejected "Christabel" in a struggle against Coleridge for literary ownership. Others have suggested that Wordsworth may simply have chosen the path of prudence: the first edition of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> had already faced troubles, and when "Christabel" finally was published, it did meet with several mocking and scathing reviews. It's possible that the Wordsworths were concerned too about Coleridge's failure to complete the poem and did not think it could be printed in its unfinished form.</p></li><li><p>None of these plausible answers explains why William's and/or Dorothy's negative reaction to the poem was so sudden and belated, nor do we know whether William or Dorothy led the charge. In any event, it is tempting to see in this decision a re-enactment of "Christabel" itself, with the Wordsworths belatedly resisting a seduction that would have turned into a malediction. If so, then belated concern about the sexual tenor of the poem cannot be ruled out. Alaric Alfred Watts reports his mother's description of a visit with Wordsworth in 1824 or 1825 in which the subject of "Christabel" came up; as she reports, Wordsworth "'did not dissent from my expressions of admiration of this poem, but rather discomposed me by observing that it was an indelicate poem, a defect which it had never suggested itself to me to associate with it."<a href="#7">[7]</a><a name="back7"> </a> Like the Janus-faced Gestalt portraits, "Christabel" lends itself to partial screens.</p></li><li><p>Whatever the Wordsworths' motives, the decision to exclude "Christabel" certainly posed immediate problems: the new edition of <em>Lyrical Ballads</em> was already in press and Wordsworth had to order the proofs destroyed. It was in this pressure for composition that Wordsworth's "Michael" had its genesis. I am not the first to suggest that "Michael" carries on an internal dialogue with "Christabel." Eilenberg has argued that "Michael" is "a work of [conscious or unconscious] usurpation" that re-enacts Wordsworth's anxiety about the "foreign" within his own literary property but that, in reworking "Christabel," leaves in its "self-thwarting narrative structure" the traces of Wordsworth's transgression against his friend (Eilenberg 97). Building on Eilenberg's recognition that "Michael" appropriates many concrete details of "Christabel" ("oak tree, faithful dog, troubling dream, and morally emblematic lamp," the alienation of children from parents, an old friend's evil to which a child is sacrificed), I want to suggest that "Michael" also revises "Christabel's" constructions of gender and sexuality to reinstate a socially safer emotional economy (Eilenberg 98-9).</p></li><li><p>I read "Michael" as at once a heterosexual pastoral and a paean to male bonding, twin projects that, as Eve Sedgwick famously demonstrated in <em>Between Men</em>, are often mutually constitutive. If "Christabel" offers us an unholy aristocratic alliance, "Michael" recreates the poor but honest Holy Family of loving father, loving mother, and beloved son. The poem makes a point that Michael "had not passed his days in singleness. / He had a Wife" (80-81), but she is not named until the time of Luke's departure in line 254. Twenty years Michael's junior (as Geraldine is presumably junior by a generation to Sir Leoline), Isabel is without question the least important family member, the one who makes the homosocial bond of father and son materially possible, the one who knows and keeps her place. Michael is as much mother as father, doing "female service" to the child and rocking his cradle "with a woman's gentle hand," further subordinating the need for the mother just as the pre-eminence of the father-son bond subordinates the marital to the filial relationship: Michael and Luke even become "playmates."</p></li><li><p>In substituting "Michael" for "Christabel," then, Wordsworth restores the dignity of the paterfamilias and privileges filial alliances between men over erotic relations with women. If Geraldine is a dangerous shape-shifter wreaking domestic havoc, Michael is a safe one who reaps domestic bliss: he is at once father, brother, and mother to his only son, yet he is as upright as Geraldine is queer. When trouble enters, it remains afar, and while the mountaintop cottage will ultimately be destroyed, while Michael and Isabel live it is incorruptible. Insofar as we can read "Michael" as an instance of the sublime, its sublimity seems to me to lie in the tragic demise of the humble trinitarian family that had been elevated wholly by virtue and industry to its high place.</p></li><li><p>The project of substitution that erases "Christabel" for "Michael" is also enacted in the sonnet to Butler and Ponsonby that Wordsworth wrote in 1824. If "Christabel" uncovers the possibility that sapphic desire can overtake the daughters of noblemen, "To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P.," seems bent on re-covery. Titled to convey nothing so much as title itself, the poem mutes sapphic desire through re-naming and metaphor. Like "Michael," "To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P." instantiates pastoral over gothic sublimity, repeating what became a longstanding difference of more than poetics between Coleridge and Wordsworth. Where "Christabel" feigns silence yet tells all in a poem left deliberately unfinished due to its "subtle and difficult" idea, William's sonnet gives a sense of fullness and closure, of an absence of mystery, a translation of anything foreign into ordinary Englishness (Coleridge, <em>Specimins</em> 114).<a href="#8">[8]</a><a name="back8"> </a> At the same time, however, Wordsworth inscribes this project of substitution into the sonnet itself, so that the cover-up can be dis-covered quite readily.</p><p>&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P.<br/>
&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; Composed in the Grounds of Plass Newidd, near Llangollen, 1824.</p><blockquote>A Stream, to mingle with your favourite Dee,<br/>
Along the Vale of Meditation flows;<br/>
So styled by those fierce Britons, pleased to see<br/>
In Nature's face the expression of repose;<br/>
Or haply there some pious hermit chose<br/>
To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;<br/>
To whom the wild sequestered region owes,<br/>
At this late day, its sanctifying name.<br/>
Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian tongue,<br/>
In ours, the Vale of Friendship, let this spot<br/>
Be named; where, faithful to a low-roofed Cot,<br/>
On Deva's banks, ye have abode so long;<br/>
Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,<br/>
Even on this earth, above the reach of Time!<a href="#9">[9]</a><a name="back9"> </a></blockquote></li><li><p>"To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P." is sparing in references to its addressees, who appear only twice, and only as pronouns, before the thirteenth line. The poem subordinates them to the landscape of Llangollen Vale in which legend and literature had inscribed them, yet the sonnet never names Llangollen itself. Instead, an elaborate set of synechdoches ends up carrying so attenuated a relationship to the women as to substitute the place for the persons rather than evoking the persons by the place. Instead of the "mingling" of Butler and Ponsonby, we get the "mingling" of stream and river; the women "favour" the river rather than one another; they "have abode so long" not with each other but "on Deva's banks"; and when their love is finally proclaimed&#8212;twice over&#8212;in the closing couplet&#8212;it arrives in the trope of sisterhood, a trope arguably not devoid of erotic potential for a Wordsworth, but hardly the marital partnership that Butler and Ponsonby lived out. And they have been faithful not to one another but to "a low-roofed Cot," an image that rather flattens the imposing enough two-story home of whose improvements they were so proud. (Arguably the "Cot" could also stand for their shared bed, a place, like the vale itself, not of excitement but of "repose," its low roof a signifier of the phallic lack.) Eventually&#8212;in the sonnet's last couplet&#8212;the love does rise&#8212;or rather, more laboriously, climb&#8212;but only, it seems, because it is "allowed" to do so, as if against someone's will. Transcending "the reach of Time," it receives immortality&#8212;and perhaps sublimity&#8212;at the body's expense.</p></li><li><p>The sonnet's central project is one of renaming, of purifying the "new place" (Plas Newydd, as Butler and Ponsonby had named their home) that had become a cultural metonym for women in love. Although "fierce Britons" have already supplied a sanctifying place-name, Wordsworth must rename the vale yet again, displacing the "Cambrian tongue" to cover or supplement the sanctifying name with one that reinforces the Anglicization of Celtic space. In naming the Glyn the Vale of Friendship, whatever is fierce or wild is yet a second time covered by English gentility. One must smile, however, when one learns that in the Welsh, Wordsworth in his misspelling has actually named this the Vale of Horse Haunches or Horse Shanks&#8212;"Glyn Cafaillgaroch"&#8212;close to, but not the same as, the correct word for friendship, "Cyfeillgarwch"&#8212;an unintended signifier of the physicality that the poem shows itself in the act of covering.</p></li><li><p>That the sonnet <em>is</em> a cover story is suggested by Wordsworth's private account of meeting Butler and Ponsonby, which was published with the poem in 1881. The women appear to him a bizarre and rather gothic pair: "so curious was the appearance of these ladies, so elaborately sentimental about themselves and their 'Caro Albergo', as they named it in an inscription on a tree that stood opposite," and "so oddly was one of these ladies attired that we took her, at a little distance, for a roman Catholic priest. . . . They were without caps, their hair bushy and white as snow, which contributed to the mistake" (Wordsworth, <em>Complete</em>). Such a passage makes clear the selectivity of the images in the sonnet and the project of substitution that erases Butler and Ponsonby's strange, curious, odd, old, and foreign&#8212;Catholic, Italian&#8212;style.</p></li><li><p>"To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P.," then, reaffirms the difference between "Michael" and "Christabel" in the <em>Lyrical Ballads</em>, instantiating English domesticity where alien wildness and transgressive gender might have reigned. Against Coleridge's gothic horror we have Wordsworth's cleansing rite. Where Coleridge points to the sexual through metonym, Wordsworth erases it through metaphor. These two poems, aesthetically and formally incommensurate to be sure, seem to me nonetheless to embody the oppositions that sapphic subjectivity is negotiating in the Romantic age: on the one hand, the secret realm of the sexualized and dangerous, on the other the public and sisterly space of the pastoral.</p></li><li><p>Mediating these poetic postures, whether in explicit response or only implicit dialogue, is Dorothy Wordsworth's "Irregular Verses," which laments the loss of just the kind of female affinity that Butler and Ponsonby lived out. Wordsworth lost her mother at six and her father at twelve and lived most of her childhood apart from her family. She loved two people with particular passion and in different ways lost both of them. Much has rightly been written about Dorothy's devotion to William, and without question William provided the most lasting connection of her life. But Dorothy also loved Jane Pollard, her closest friend in Halifax, and the biographical record has played down the intensity of that love. Dorothy had hoped to make a life with Jane, assuring her in one early letter that "no man I have seen has appeared to regard me with any degree of partiality; nor has anyone gained my affections, of this you need not doubt" (Dorothy Wordsworth, <em>Letters</em> 26). As her own doubts assail her, she tells Jane that "no words can paint my affection and friendship for you my dear Girl. When shall we meet! sometimes I am in despair and think that happy time will never arrive, at others I am all hope, but despair, alas! frequently gets the better of me" (<em>Letters</em> 14). Another letter imagines their reunion:</p><blockquote>I entreat you my love to think . . . of what will be our felicity when we are again united . . . think of our moonlight walks attended by my own dear William, think of our morning rambles when we shall--after having passed the night together and talked over the pleasures of the preceding evening, steal from our lodging-room, perhaps before William rises, and walk alone enjoying all the sweets of female friendship. I have nothing to recommend me to your regard but a warm honest and affectionate heart, a heart that will be for ever united to yours by the tenderest friendship, that will sympathize in all your feelings and palpitate with rapture when [I] once more throw myself into your arms (<em>Letters</em> 100).</blockquote><p>It is interesting that the triadic family Dorothy imagines here bears the shape not of "Michael" or of the biographical threesome that forged the <em>Lyrical Ballads</em>&#8212;two Wordsworths and Coleridge&#8212;but that of the Leolines: two women and a man. Here Dorothy is the hinge uniting William and Jane.</p></li><li><p>But William, of course, married, and so did Jane, and in her later years an ill and emotionally isolated Dorothy lamented happier times when longing was still tempered by hope. Most of Dorothy Wordsworth's poetry dates from these years; she seems to have used the poems as a means of measuring early fantasies against her later life. Among the several interesting features of this poetry are lush images that one can read as sexual: "foaming streamlets," "secret nooks," and rocks "with velvet moss o'ergrown" and "hips of glossy red" to which the poet is "tempted" and "seduced." But Wordsworth's most pervasive image is the woodland cottage that she chooses explicitly against the sublimity of a "Kubla Khan" in a passage that also opposes womblike shelter to phallic heights: "the shelter of our rustic Cot / Receives us, &amp; we envy not / The palace or the stately dome" (Dorothy Wordsworth, <em>Romanticism</em> 175-237).<a href="#10">[10]</a><a name="back10"> </a></p></li><li><p>Asked by Jane Pollard's daughter Julia to write a Christmas verse, Dorothy began her extended work on the poem she would call "<a href="/praxis/sexuality/lanser/irregularverses.html" shape="rect">Irregular Verses</a>." While the poem is clearly not a direct response to William's sonnet, it imagines a romantic pastoral much like the one associated with Butler and Ponsonby: a life "exquisite and pure" in "a cottage in a verdant dell" enveloped by plenitude. The Llangollen couple were famous for their gardens, and Dorothy creates here likewise a "garden stored with fruits and flowers / And sunny seats and shady bowers," supporting a life whose completeness is emphasized through the repetition of "all" and "every" in lines 7-8. But Dorothy infuses sexuality back into the scene, as if revising her brother's imagery and suggesting the compatibility of pleasure and virtue in female same-sex bonds. Where Butler and Ponsonby were described as faithful to a "low-roofed Cot," Dorothy and Jane "raised a tower/Of bliss" (13-14). Their stream does not merely "mingle" but "foams"; their wanderings "to the topmost height" are invited rather than simply allowed; and there is no "lack." This project of "hope untamed" is not "vexed" by "maxims of caution" or "prudent fears." Moreover and defiantly, this is a state that has no need of poetry or of the now-reverenced "Poet" (evoked in line 60) who might as likely be William as a generic type.</p></li><li><p>Surely this scene figures a sapphic sublimity implicitly as sexual as that of "Christabel" but without any of Coleridge's predatory and foreboding images. The difference makes it worth speculating that Dorothy may have influenced the rejection of "Christabel" for the <em>Lyrical Ballads</em> once she came to terms with its partially demonic rendering of sapphic desires. But "Irregular Verses" turns away from its own "sight to dream of" to the barren reality that befalls not those who transgress but those who are afraid to transgress, as we suddenly learn that "the cottage fled in air" and the "streamlet never flowed." These images&#8212;a cottage that flees, a stream that never flowed&#8212;suggest an <em>un</em>natural turn, "by <em>duty</em> led," from what would have been a natural happiness with Jane, who has traded the "brighter gem" of their youth together for a "prince's diadem." (Jane Pollard married a linen manufacturer from Leeds and bore eleven children.) Jane's daughter, the "natural" fruit of this marriage, is figured as "placid" and "staid," a poor copy of the mother with whose heart the writer's own still beats in unison. And even poetry&#8212;William's child, one could argue&#8212;is superfluous where there is love, Dorothy suggests in a passage that surely raises questions about a woman who centered her life on her brother and his work.</p></li><li><p>Wordsworth apparently worked intensely on this poem over a period of several years; that she made at least three fair copies suggests that she wanted the poem to circulate. But key lines and sections of the poem are absent from the two variant copies: the entire last section (84-107); the mention in line 16 of a "bliss that (so deemed we) should endure" and, most dramatically, the section that begins with the fleeing cottage and extends to the prince's diadem (39-55). In other words, the variant versions skirt the drama of homoerotic desire and its concession to heterosexual convention that is at the heart of the poem: the rupture itself and the constancy of the longing after so many years: the love that is also, if differently, "beyond the reach of Time." If this kind of self-silencing testifies to the difficulty of articulating sapphic desires and losses, it also leaves an idyllic residue in which the scene of parting is erased.</p></li><li><p>The representation of female intimacy in "Irregular Verses," as the poem's own title suggests, extends beyond content and image to poetic form. Dorothy used the word "irregular" in the titles of three of her poems, but "Irregular Verses" bears the most glaring metrical aberrance of the three: the moment in line 43, the only line of heptameter in the poem: "Though in our riper years we each pursued a different way." Visually as well as aurally distinct, this line breaks the poem in two just at the moment of breach in the relationship. This "irregularity" seems to me to be a powerful poetic statement in itself, a truth the speaker "ne'er strove to decorate" and thus refuses to reduce to the tetrameter that is the poem's basic metric form. The few lines of hexameter also stand out for their common theme: the brightness of youth, the joys one remembers, the beloved's "rising sigh" for what could not be. In this uses of irregular metrics, prosody itself turns into trope: it stands in for, or figures, something that cannot be said straightforwardly.</p></li><li><p>But as readers of Virgil well know, the pastoral is
already charged with homoerotic possibilities.&nbsp; It
is a female inscription of these possibilities for bliss
in a "humble cottage"&mdash;a gender swerve that
parallels the one Byron makes in his list of loving
couples&mdash;that Dorothy Wordsworth's "Irregular
Verses" takes up as it mediates the poetic poles here
represented by Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Whether
in explicit response to her brother or only in implicit
dialogue, "Irregular Verses" mourns for just the kind of
female affinity that Butler and Ponsonby lived out.
Wordsworth loved two people with particular passion and
in different ways lost both of them. Much has been
written about the metrics of "Christabel," and it is not
my intention to argue that Coleridge's meter (which, as
several critics have noted, he himself does not
accurately describe)<a href=
"#11">[11]</a><a name="back11"></a>
is simply a function of the "irregular" sexuality of the
text. But the preface does suggest some connection
between the text's "imagery or passion" and its prosody
and Coleridge's choice of the term "wantonly" underscores
the possibility that the "passion" in question is sexual.
Ann Batten Cristall's use of "irregular" in the subtitle
for both her 1795 volume <em>Poetical Sketches in
Irregular Verse</em> and for a very specific
(male-female) love poem, "Thelmon and Carmel: An
Irregular Poem," also links sexuality to irregular
prosody.</p></li><li><p>My suggestion that sexual content in particular may be connected to professions of irregular poetic form finds a further source in yet another poem about two women, Percy Shelley's "Rosalind and Helen" (1818). Shelley's "modern eclogue" is prefaced by a disclaimer similar to that of "Christabel" and possibly influenced by it: "the impulse of the feelings which moulded the conception of the story," says Shelley, "determined the pauses of a measure, which only pretends to be regular inasmuch as it corresponds with, and expresses, the irregularity of the imaginations which inspired it" (Shelley 186). As Shelley scholar Neil Fraistat assures me, this claim of "irregularity" is rare if not unique in Shelley's work. A poem that is probably biographical in source, evoking what John Donovan describes as a rupture of "the long intimacy between Mary and her girlhood companion Isabel Baxter," "Rosalind and Helen" projects a fantasy of reunion that "transforms into a critical and revisionary feminism that is plotted so as to close on an image that marries the domestic and the sublime" (Donovan 245, 269). It's important to point out, however, that this sublimity, like that in Wordsworth's sonnet, is also structured to transcend time; the poem devotes much less attention to Rosalind and Helen's union than to their deaths, and the final, conditional message is that "<em>if</em> love die not in the dead / As in the living, none of mortal kind / Are blest, as now Helen and Rosalind" (ll. 1316-1318).</p></li><li><p>Moreover, while this sublime and domestic union of two women is never articulated as sexual&#8212;though the use of the Shakespearean names is certainly suggestive&#8212;the early tension between the two women is marked as a bodily phenomenon, as if subliminity has to overcome a certain physical repulsion that subtly evokes "Christabel." When the two first re-encounter one another, although Helen asks her "sweet Rosalind" to "come sit by me" and recalls the "cherished token" of Rosalind's "woven hair" (36-37) that she still keeps, Rosalind speaks of Helen's "tainting touch" (42) and Henry describes Rosalind as "strange" (91). When Helen finally takes Rosalind's hand as they meet again at evening, the text makes a point to say that Helen is now "<em>un</em>repelled" (my emphasis), implying an earlier repulsion. While this "taint" and "repulsion" can be explained on one level by the friends' painful history, it sits upon the text as a physical obstacle to be overcome before the pair can settle with their children in what Dorothy Wordsworth might have called a "cottage of bliss." But the metrical scene of this domestic union is a scene of irregularity; it's worth noting that one of the least euphonious if not technically irregular pairs of lines in the poem is the one that tells us: "So Rosalind and Helen lived together / Thenceforth, changed in all else, yet friends again" (1275-76).</p></li><li><p>Without reducing metrics to sexuality, I would note that even William Wordsworth's sonnet to Butler and Ponsonby is irregular within the context of his <em>oeuvre</em>: while the <em>overwhelming</em> majority of his sonnets are Petrarchan, "To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P." is mainly Spenserian, with an oddly Petrarchan third quatrain, and its final rhymed couplet is an exceeding rarity among Wordsworth's 500-odd sonnets. (I've found it only in "Scorn Not the Sonnet," where Wordsworth purposes are manifestly metatextual.) Whether to heroize Butler and Ponsonby or to foreclose all openness, that couplet puts the poem, like the "sisters in love," beyond the reach of earthly scrutiny.<a href="#12">[12]</a><a name="back12"> </a></p></li><li><p>Dorothy Wordsworth's poems, however, show a fascination with an irregularity that is aberrant in the works of William Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. There are images of being "tempted" to a road with a "serpent line" or "lured by a little winding path" for which the speaker quits "the public road." But irregularity is even more prominent in Wordsworth's prosody. Several poems have stanzas of differing lengths, and many feature irregular lines. A sudden hexameter will burst forth from a poem written in tetrameter, for instance, or a line will turn up that is difficult to scan at all. I am struck by the fact that many of the irregular lines express loss and longing: for example "Thither your eyes may turn&#8212;the Isle is passed away" in "Floating Island," or the more hopeful "And I can look upon the past without a pang, without a fear" in "To Rotha Quillinan." Three of her twenty-five or so poems use "irregular" in their titles or subtitles: "A Holiday at Gwerndovennant: Irregular Stanzas," "Loving and Liking. Irregular Verses Addressed to a Child," and "Irregular Verses."</p></li><li><p>These multiple instances suggest that for Dorothy Wordsworth, "irregularity" was a declaration of poetic style and arguably of identity. Since Dorothy reworked most of her poems on several occasions, she certainly could have purged them of metrical anomalies. (And surely William could legitimately have labeled his "Ode: Intimates of Immortality" as "Irregular Stanzas" too.) It is also clear that Dorothy Wordsworth knew how to write in common scansion, yet her niece Dora Wordsworth claimed that "<em>Aunt cannot write regular metre</em>," and Dorothy herself wrote in 1806, "I have no command of language, no power of expressing my ideas, and no one was ever more inapt at molding words into regular metre. I have often tried when I have been walking alone (muttering to myself as is my Brother's custom) to express my feelings in verse; feelings, and <em>ideas</em> such as they were, I have never wanted at those times; but prose and rhyme and blank verse were jumbled together and nothing every came of it" (Dora Wordsworth [needspg#]; Dorothy Wordsworth 66). Given her rejection of more regular verse as "jingling rhyme," however, might this apparent self-criticism not function as a backhanded claim to originality? In the Preface to her <em>Poetical Sketches</em> Ann Batten Cristall apologizes in what may be a similarly disingenuous way for her irregularities of prosody by saying that they are the "wild" practices of one "without the knowledge of any rules" and that her poetic subjects are likewise perhaps ill-advised; but she also uses that irregularity as the grounds for a claim that her work is original: "I can only say that what I have written is genuine, and that I am but little indebted either to ancient or modern poets" (Cristall 11).</p></li><li><p>I want to speculate that Dorothy Wordsworth's insistence on "irregularity," repeated in the tropes of so many poems, constitutes something of what Foucault would call a "reverse discourse" or "reverse practice" that was also produced by women of more obvious sapphic propensity such as Anne Lister, and that serves to tie sexuality to genius in yet another way. If, as I have written elsewhere,<a href="#13">[13]</a><a name="back13"> </a> gentrywomen could create cover stories for sapphic affinities by asserting both their class status and their femininity&#8212;hence their <em>regularity</em>&#8212;it is all the more interesting that some of them nonetheless present themselves as <em>ir</em>regular. Even as Butler and Ponsonby nurtured a surface&#8212;and a surfeit&#8212;of pastoral and domestic tropes that helped to screen out sexual suspicion, they also named one of their dogs Sapho, made no pretense of separate rooms or separate beds, called one another "my Beloved," wore mannish riding coats long after these were in fashion, and allowed themselves numerous eccentricities that set them apart from the norms of women imagined by Rousseau. Anne Lister, indeed, as much as <em>becomes</em> Rousseau: in her journal Lister quotes from the <em>Confessions</em> that "I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world" and fashions herself as a "soft, gentleman like" and quite self-consciously irregular figure.</p></li><li><p>In this light, Anne Lister and Dorothy Wordsworth bear some striking sympathies. Like Wordsworth, Lister longed for a primary affiliation with a woman (Mariana Lawton) who grieved her by marrying. Wordsworth created irregular verse forms for sexual images; Lister wrote sexual acts into her journals in secret code. When Lister finally visited the home of Butler and Ponsonby, her longing evokes the mood of "Irregular Verses": Llangollen, she says, "excited in me . . . a sort of peculiar interest tinged with melancholy. I could have mused for hours, dreampt dreams of happiness, conjured up many a vision of . . . hope" (44). Lister's diaries evoke the plot of "Irregular Verses," a plot of love, loss and longing for a woman who has chosen marriage to a man, and Lister shares Dorothy's disdain for those who marry from "caution" and "prudence": Mariana, like Jane Pollard, is "too tamely worldly." Lister reports that she "felt low" after leaving Llangollen, wistful to see Butler and Ponsonby together, with Mariana at her side.</p></li><li><p>In Anne Lister's diaries and Dorothy Wordsworth's poems, sapphic scenarios get written into what their contemporary Felicia Hemans might have called "the stately Homes of England"&#8212;or in Wordsworth's case, the "cottage Homes." For Lister, as for Wordsworth, writing was the primary way to make sense of oneself in a world where "elective affinities" were still rarely&#8212;and not even in Goethe's novel of that name&#8212;to be lived out. As she recasts her desires <em>as</em> language, Lister, like Wordsworth, holds on to irregularity as a kind of master trope for inscribing herself as a subject, and like so many men and women both during the Romantic moment and since, she invokes an image of Butler and Ponsonby, more or less put to the blush, as the Personification of same-sex desire. "Throwing my mind on paper always does me good," Lister writes after her melancholy visit to Llangollen. One can see Byron making a similar use of writing when he soothes the "chaos of hope and sorrow" of parting from Edlestone by vowing to put Butler and Ponsonby "to the blush." Indeed, the "Ladies of Llangollen" can also be understood as a Romantic trope figuring the sublimity and the sorrows of same-sex desire at a time of intense cultural ambivalence and ambiguity.</p></li><li><p>The poems I have examined here inscribe that ambivalence and ambiguity both in their configurations of desire and in their visions of its fulfillment. If "Christabel" makes sapphism a mysterious compulsion with devastating effects, William Wordsworth tames it into chaste sisterhood while Dorothy Wordsworth restores its erotic sublimity through metaphor. But Dorothy also inscribes the <em>materiality</em> of desire: the pastoral spaces where it might dwell, the social and economic barriers to its fulfillment, and the emotional consequences of abandoning desire for safety. It's also worth nothing that of all the poems, it is only Wordsworth's sexless sonnet that sustains a union of two women against some form of loss.</p></li><li><p>The political philosopher Jacques Ranci&#232;re has suggested that it is metaphors and stories, not rational argument as Habermas would have it, that most effectively shepherd previously unrecognized groups into a position where their rights can be recognized. This is indeed the value (and also the limitation) of the trope: it can figure without even confronting its own implicit ideology. In this light, the figurations of sapphism in Romantic poetry may have helped to make possible the social changes that the poets themselves might neither have imagined nor approved. It is worth remembering, therefore, that the very meaning of "trope" lies in irregularity. Drawn from the Greek <em>tropein</em>, to turn, the trope <em>is</em> a perversion, a breaking of rules, a seduction of language from its proper course. It is also perversely true, of course, that without tropes there is not much that we can say. Rather like same-sex union itself, then, the trope is a kind of 'elective affinity,' and one without which there would surely be no representation, no poetry, and perhaps nothing to blush about.<br/></p></li></ol></div>
&#160;
<div class="notesWorks"><h4>Works Cited</h4><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Binhammer, Katherine. "The Sex Panic of the 1790s." <em>Journal of the History of Sexuality</em> 6 (1996): 409-34.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Byron, George Gordon. "To Elizabeth Pigot." 5 July 1807. <em>Byron: A Self-Portrait: Letters and Diaries 1798 to 1824</em>. Ed. Peter Quennell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Cristall, Ann Batten. Preface. <em>Poetical Sketches</em>. London: J. Johnson, 1795.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Christabel." <em>The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge</em>. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 1912. London: Oxford UP, 1964.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang"><em>---. Specimins of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge</em>. 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1835.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Condor, Josiah. Rev. of "Christabel," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. <em>Coleridge: The Critical Heritage</em>. Ed. by J. R. de Jackson. London: Routledge, 1970.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Curran, Stuart. "Of Gene Pools, Genetic Mapping, Recessive Chromosomes, and Freaks of Nature." <em>Romantic Circles</em> NASSR 1996. University of Maryland. 6 September 2005 &lt;<a href="/reference/misc/confarchive/nassr96/curran.html">http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/confarchive/nassr96/curran.html</a>&gt;.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">de Montaigne, Michel. "Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts." <em>Eighteenth-Century Studies</em> 32 (1998-9): 179-98.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Donovan, John. "'Rosalind and Helen': Pastoral, Exile, Memory." <em>Romanticism</em> 4 (1998): [needs page numbers].</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Eilenberg, Susan. <em>Strange power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession</em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Elfenbein, Andrew. <em>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</em>. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Halperin, David. <em>How to do the History of Homosexuality</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 78.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Lanser, Susan. "Befriending the Body." <em>Eighteenth-Century Studies</em> 32 (1998-9): 179-98.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang"><em>Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Volume I: The Early Years</em>. Ed. by Chester L. Shaver.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Liddington, Jill. <em>Female Fortune, Land, Gender and Authority: The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833-36</em>. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998. 182.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Lister, Anne. <em>I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister: 1791-1840.</em> Ed. by Helena<br/>
Whitbread. London: Virago, 1988.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Matlak, Richard E. <em>The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797-1800</em>. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">O'Donnell, Brennan. "The 'Invention' of a Meter: 'Christabel' Meter as Fact and Fiction." <em>JEGP</em> 100 (2001): 511-36.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Pilkington, Mary. <em>Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters</em>. London: Albion Press, 1804.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Russett, Margaret. "Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating <em>Christabel</em>." <em>SEL</em> 43 (2003): 773-97.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Seward, Anna. <em>Llangollen Vale, Inscribed to the Right Honourable Lady Eleanor Butler, and Miss Ponsonby</em>. <em>Poetical Works</em>. London, 1810.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Sha, Richard C. "Romanticism and Sexuality - A Special Issue of <em>Romanticism On the Net</em>." <i>Romanticism On the Net</i> 23 (August 2001) 6 September 2005. &lt;<a href="http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n23/005994ar.html">http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n23/005994ar.html</a>&gt;</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Shelley, Percy Bysshe. <em>Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Ecologue</em>. <i>The Complete Poetry of Keats and Shelley</i>. New York: Modern Library [no year listed].</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Taylor, Jeremy. "The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire." <em>Attending to Early Modern Women V.</em> Newark: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming 2005.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Watts, Alaric Alfred. <em>Alaric Watts: A Narrative of His Life.</em> 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley &amp; Son, 1884.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Wordsworth, Dora. "Letter to Edward Gullivanan." [needs the rest of the citation].</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Wordsworth, Dorothy. <em>Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism</em>. Ed. by Susan M. Levin. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang"><em>---</em>. <em>The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth</em>. Ed. by William Knight. McMillan &amp; Co., London, 1925.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. Letters to Jane Pollard: 14 January 1788, 30 June 1793, 10 July 1793, 14 July 1793. <i>Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Volume I: The Early Years</i>. Ed. by Chester L. Shaver. London: Oxford UP, 1967.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Wordsworth, William. <em>Complete Poetical Works</em>. 1888.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. "To the Lady E. B. and the Hon. Miss P." <em>Poetical Works of Wordsworth.</em> Ed. by Thomas Hutchinson. 1904. London: Oxford UP, 1965.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Worthen, John. <em>The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons, and the Wordsworths in 1802</em>. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.</p></div><div class="notesWorks"><h4>Notes</h4><p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> See, "Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts," <em>Eighteenth-Century Studies</em> 32 (Winter 1998-99), 179-98, and "The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire," in <em>Attending to Early Modern Women V</em>.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> In the later eighteenth century, public opinion seems to have been especially susceptible to three particular axes of perception: the "femininity" or "masculinity" of the women in question; the extent to which they adhered to proprieties of class and gender; and their social rank. Long-term, female attachments that conformed externally to social codes, and were lived out by women of what I call the gentle classes, had the greatest chance of passing for pure.<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> See Andrew Elfenbein, <em>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</em>, 203, 14, and <em>passim</em>.<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> I take this definition from the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> At another level of figuration, one could argue that Geraldine and Christabel are themselves metonyms of their fathers: just as the spell upon Christabel becomes "Lord of [her] utterance," so Geraldine's seduction of daughter and father alike can be read as the revenge of her own father, Lord Roland de Vaux. But Geraldine is also arguably taking her revenge against patriarchy itself; seized forcibly at the outset by "five warriors," left "scarce alive" beneath the maternal "broad-breasted" oak, Geraldine wreaks vengeance on the Father by violating first the daughter and then perhaps the family line.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> Had Coleridge not excised the description of Geraldine as "old and lean and foul of hue," or "Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue," it might have been more difficult to read sublimity into the poem. Susan Eilenberg reports the former deleted line in <em>Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession</em>, 104; Arthur Nethercot reports the latter in <em>The Road to Tryermaine: A Study of the History, Background, and Purposes of Coleridge's "Christabel"</em>, 32.<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> Alaric Alfred Watts, <em>Alaric Watts: A Narrative of His Life</em>, I, 239. I owe my knowledge of this reference to Elfenbein's <em>Romantic Genius</em>, but Elfenbein does not explain that Wordsworth's comment postdates by half a century his decision about the <em>Lyrical Ballads</em>.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> I thank Neil Fraistat for suggesting this contrast between "Christabel" and the sonnet.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup> "To the Lady E. B. and the Hon. Miss P." was first published in <em>Miscellaneous Sonnets</em> (1827) as part of the five-volume edition of Wordsworth's Poems. I have taken this version from <em>The Poetical Works of Wordsworth</em>, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 216.<br/><a href="#back9">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup> Dorothy Wordsworth's extant poems have been gathered and edited by Susan M. Levin, <em>Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism</em>, 175-237.<br/><a href="#back10">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="11"> </a>11</sup> See, for example, Brennan O'Donnell, "The 'Invention' of a Meter: 'Christabel' Meter as Fact and Fiction," <em>JEGP</em> 100, 4 (October 2001): 511-36; and Margaret Russett, "Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating <em>Christabel</em>," <em>SEL</em> 43, 4 (Autumn 2003): 773-97.<br/><a href="#back11">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="12"> </a>12</sup> It's also worth noting that each of these poems also yokes female affiliations to charged family ties, supporting Foucault's hypothesis that at the turn of the nineteenth century kinship and sexuality have converged in ways that give domestic relations a new burden of affectivity. Sapphism and incest both stand at the crossroads between kinship demands and elective desires: if incest undoes kinship by overloading it from within, sapphism undoes it by displacing it from without.<br/><a href="#back12">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="13"> </a>13</sup> See Lanser, "Befriending the Body."<br/><a href="#back13">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="bottom"> </a></sup></p><p><br/></p></div></div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/lanser-susan-s">Lanser, Susan S.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/samuel-taylor-coleridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Samuel Taylor Coleridge</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/843" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">tropes</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/percy-bysshe-shelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1037" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">lyrical ballads</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1354" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Christabel</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1997" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anne Lister</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1998" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eleanor Butler</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1999" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sarah Ponsonby</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2000" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ladies of Llangollen</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">prosody</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homoeroticism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">women</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">lesbianism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2005" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Irregular Verses</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2007" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Rosalind and Helen</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/mary-pilkington" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Pilkington</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/dorothy-wordsworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dorothy Wordsworth</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/anna-seward" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anna Seward</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/henry-fielding" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Henry Fielding</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/michel-de-montaigne" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel de Montaigne</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/anne-lister" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anne Lister</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jane-pollard" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Pollard</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-wordsworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Wordsworth</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/e-butler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">E. Butler</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jeremy-taylor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeremy Taylor</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/eleanor-butler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eleanor Butler</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/susan-eilenberg" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Eilenberg</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/sarah-ponsonby" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sarah Ponsonby</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/cambridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cambridge</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/wales" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wales</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:31 +0000rc-admin14948 at http://www.rc.umd.edu"That Obscure Object of Historical Desire"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/halperin/halperin.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/index.html">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div id="container"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>"That Obscure Object of Historical Desire"</h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>David M. Halperin, University of Michigan</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">David Halperin responds to the essays in this collection, many of which respond to his 2002 book, _How to Do the History of Homosexuality_. This essay appears in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><ol><li><p>I was of course pleased but also quite surprised when Richard Sha wrote me to say that he had conceived the idea of a volume for the Romantic Circles Praxis Series that would consist of responses to my 2002 book, <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em>. I know little, and so I said little, about the Romantic period in that book, and I didn't see how my speculations would be especially helpful to Romanticists. So it was with a good deal of interest that I read the stimulating essays collected here, but it was also with a continuing sense of puzzlement&#8212;a puzzlement shared, evidently, by some of the contributors themselves, who could identify only extremely tenuous or general connections between their work and my own. The result, which will be reflected in the commentary that follows, has been a pronounced fluctuation in our level of engagement with one another's work.</p></li><li><p>I found myself most in sympathy with the projects of Susan Lanser and Bradford Mudge. Lanser's effort to imagine and to describe a history of female homosexuality separate from that of male homosexuality is very much in line with a couple of hints contained in my book, as she notes, though the credit for conceiving lesbianism as both a perennial potentiality within and a possible menace to the social structures of male dominance belongs to Gayle Rubin and to Valerie Traub, as Lanser also knows.<a href="#1">[1]</a><a name="back1"> </a> Moreover, Lanser seems to be elaborating the tension that Traub discerns in English Renaissance discourses between the figure of the tribade and the figure of the friend, the former being a monstrous image of sex and gender deviance while the latter embodies the possibility of a female homoeroticism contained within the bounds of virtue and the canons of femininity. When Lanser writes of "the fine line of external appearance that separates the gender-bending sapphist from the virtuous friend," I wonder about two things. First, what sort of historical connections does Lanser see between the phenomena described by Traub in the earlier period and what Lanser calls "the lines separating virtuous from transgressive alliances" in her period&#8212;lines which, she says, "were often literally paper thin"? Second, I wonder whether or not it makes sense to attempt to construct, from whatever resemblances there might be between "the tribade" and "the gender-bending sapphist" on the one hand and the virtuous female friends of the early modern and Romantic periods on the other, two enduring types or figures or forms of life that would correspond, within the history of lesbianism, to the sorts of transhistorical categories that compose a genealogy of male homosexuality, at least according to the model I sketched out in the title essay of my book.</p></li><li><p>The source of my greatest sympathy with Lanser springs from her avowed interest in the possible connections between homosexuality and cultural forms, because that interest happens to coincide with my current preoccupations.<a href="#2">[2]</a><a name="back2"> </a> Lanser seeks to uncover and to clarify the relation between poetic tropes and female homosexuality as well as the relation between poetic discourse and the history of sexuality in general: "I want to ask," she writes, "what we can learn about the place of sapphism in the Romantic imagination by looking at poetic tropes." I would like to encourage her to pursue and even to broaden that project, by analyzing the peculiar relevance of specific cultural forms to homosexuality itself. As she notes, Andrew Elfenbein has already provided a model for such a project in <em>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</em>, which inquires into what might be called the culture of homosexuality, by which I mean both homosexuality as a cultural practice and culture as a carrier of homosexual meanings. Elfenbein's achievement in that book, at least in the eyes of this non-specialist, consists in describing and assessing the particular sexual value that could be attached, and that came ultimately to be attached, to a cultural form&#8212;in this case, the theory and practice of individual genius. It is as if Elfenbein had identified, at a formative stage in the developmental history of European culture, what D. A. Miller identified at a formative stage in the developmental history of the gay male individual: namely, "those early pre-sexual realities of gay experience" that impart a definite, discernible gay orientation, a kind of gay internal logic, to an existence that has yet to crystallize into a homosexual identity&#8212;that can be described, therefore, only as proto-gay (26).</p></li><li><p>At least since the success of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and its spinoffs, it has become commonplace to regard homosexuality as somehow producing a unique perspective on the world as well as a cluster of superior insights into life, love, and matters of taste in general. According to this way of thinking, homosexuality involves not only specific sexual practices but a wide variety of distinctive social and cultural practices, a particular attitude to life, a critical take on straight society, a heightened sense of taste and style, a collectively shared but nonetheless singular outlook on the world. Of course, as any reader of Elfenbein's book knows, such a notion is nothing new&#8212;although its entry into the stock of received ideas that constitute the common sense of straight society has been relatively recent. It seems to me that Lanser may be in a good position to contribute an important and revealing chapter to the history of that notion, and to expand its purview within studies of female homoeroticism and homosexuality. "Tropics of discourse," ethical as well as literary genres, structures of feeling, and codes of behavior may offer a lot of useful material with which to think about sexuality as a cultural form no less than as an erotic practice.<a href="#3">[3]</a><a name="back3"> </a> It would be good to know more about the lesbian specifics of sexuality as culture.</p></li><li><p>Bradford Mudge's proposal "to include the emergence of pornography as one of the premier events of modern culture" in our new histories of both sexuality and literature is also most welcome and long overdue. Others have considered the rise of pornography in the eighteenth century to be formative for the constitution of modern sexual subjects.<a href="#4">[4]</a><a name="back4"> </a> Mudge extends their work by providing a rigorously historicist approach to the very category of pornography that gives it new substance and greater precision in historical terms. As he writes, "The history of pornography begins at the moment that the word itself is dislodged as a 'given,' as an absolute that imposes itself anachronistically upon contested terrain." Although he apologizes for taking part in a "semantic shell game" that consists in arguing about what exactly the word means and to what phenomena it can be most accurately applied, he rightly insists that this sort of semantic quibbling "performs a necessary service, opening up 'pornography' as an imaginative construct whose history has the potential to complicate our ideas about human sexuality and its representations." The study of the word, its meaning, and the history of its deployment is crucial, because, "like 'homosexuality,' in other words, 'pornography' can uncritically erase the very historical process that brought it into being&#8212;regardless of critical intentions." Mudge's analysis dramatizes, and is intended to dramatize, the usefulness of the kind of historicism that I have tried to defend, so it's not surprising that I like his essay. I also agree with Mudge that many feminist critiques of pornography, in the course of their laudable efforts to focus attention on the enduring aspects of gender hierarchies, have despecified and essentialized it.<a href="#5">[5]</a><a name="back5"> </a></p></li><li><p>Jill Heydt-Stevenson's study of the sexual exuberance of Jane Austen's early writings clearly fits in well with Mudge's project. Mudge writes:</p><blockquote>What if, however, modern "literature" had an evil twin, a shady and disreputable other whose pleasures mocked the refined taste of the public sphere even as they embodied the quintessence of its new consumer capitalism? What if, in other words, literature and pornography were complementary constructions whose Manichean drama (as artificial and self-serving a contest as those staged by professional wrestling) obscures the power with which they together construct and deploy sexual norms and deviancies? Then, presumably, the sexual bodies imagined by romantic fiction would become valuable prehistory to our modern paradigms; no longer either legitimate or illegitimate aesthetic representations, they would instead become both imaginative prefigurements of our lived realities and historical records of the evolving conflicts between private acts and the public domain that sought at once to express and control those acts.</blockquote></li><li><p>Daniel O'Quinn's effort to historicize "Equiano as a subject of desire" did not fail to evoke a grateful echo in me.<a href="#6">[6]</a><a name="back6"> </a> I wonder if Equiano's post-conversion memoir affords material of sufficient quality and quantity to enable the critic to historicize his erotic subjectivity, but I can only applaud O'Quinn's impulse to "bring styles of thinking endemic to queer theory to bear on the historical materialism of much recent work on the relationship between colonial and metropolitan society in Romantic studies."</p></li><li><p>I now come to the essays by Jonathan Loesberg and Richard Sha, both of which contain substantial critiques of my work on Foucault and the history of sexuality, and which call for a more extended response. I shall try nonetheless to be brief.</p></li><li><p>Loesberg is envious of me. That is not a moral judgment: it is what he proudly and unapologetically declares. He endows me (undoubtedly for the first and last time in my life) with a heroic glamor, analogous to that attached to the survivors of the Normandy landings in the eyes of the post-Spielberg generation, and he positions himself as a "hedgerow historian"&#8212;that is, a detached, nostalgic spectator longing, at a safe distance, for the danger and glory of The Good Fight. In this case, that fight is over the proper uses of Foucault, of gay history, and of the interpretation of sexual life in ancient Greece. Loesberg's ostensibly frank avowal of the inauthenticity of his stake in these controversies&#8212;he has, he confesses, "no Greek, no Latin, no expertise in any of the requisite fields"&#8212;is, and is meant to be, disarming. In other words, it doesn't leave me much in the way of a viable subject-position from which to respond. Can the object of voyeuristic fascination speak? Can those who already know their credentials to be inauthentic suffer any further disqualification? As typically happens in public self-abasement, however, Loesberg confesses to the wrong sin: what he excuses himself for merely serves as a cover for a more dubious maneuver that he refuses to cop to.</p></li><li><p>To be perfectly uncharitable about it, Loesberg is unhappy because he feels excluded from the philosophical thrills of the history of homosexuality&#8212;and excluded by homosexuals, of all people, who have somehow managed to shoulder him aside in a come-from-behind triumph of radical chic. He wants to stake his claim to this territory, in particular to explore the philosophical issues that emerge from scholarly efforts to link history with politics, truth with power, Foucault's life with Foucault's work, and homosexuality with the history of homosexuality.<a href="#7">[7]</a><a name="back7"> </a> In the case of Foucault, he objects to readings of Foucault's <em>History of Sexuality</em> that invoke Foucault's interest in sadomasochistic practices in order either to defend or to discredit his work, and he criticizes me for letting liberal critics "off the hook by creating the authentic connection of a hagiography that excludes them from the possibility of comprehending." He goes on to say that "the problem with all these connections (between S/M and life) is that they reduce the challenge of Foucault's thought to a reaction to a specific practice rather than using a reaction to a practice to test our ability to accommodate a way of thinking." (Loesberg's own tendency to characterize my approach to Foucault and to gay history as narrowly political rather than as philosophical or scholarly seems to me reductive in just this way.) Loesberg clearly has an investment in this topic: he wants to be right there, in the front lines of the battle, on Omaha Beach, but he thinks he's too late to make it. He comforts himself for not being an authentic warrior by constructing from his very inauthenticity a passport to philosophy, if not to Normandy, one which has (according to him) Foucault's authenticating stamp on it. I do sympathize with him, in fact: working occasionally as a man in feminism, I too have experienced the masochistic joys and epistemic benefits of inauthenticity, of being necessarily and irredeemably the wrong man in the wrong place.<a href="#8">[8]</a><a name="back8"> </a></p></li><li><p>The problem is that Loesberg isn't willing to interrogate the nature of his own investment in The Good Cause beyond simply declaring it. Much less is he willing to claim it and own it. What his handwringing amounts to is a refusal to recognize that in fact he has no "hedgerow envy": there is no detachment here, no belatedness at the scene of battle. Loesberg is passionately engaged, in his fashion. He is already implicated in the history and theory of homosexuality, but he is not willing to explore (indeed, he is almost unwilling to name) his own implication in it as a heterosexual postmodernist, except by entitling his interest, defensively, "philosophy." Thus, his apologetic, self-conscious, abashed, but ultimately triumphal claim to join the party ends up looking too much like what it had sincerely wanted to avoid: namely, an assertion of heterosexual (philosophical) privilege. But, really, as all the world knows, identification is a solvent of identity. There is room in gay history for all sorts of people, and the history of sexuality matters to many of us for many sorts of reasons. Identifying, claiming, and knowingly mobilizing those reasons shouldn't be such a scary business. Nor should it be necessary to make other people pay for one's own lack of the "correct" identitarian or scholarly qualifications, for one's loss of a sense of entitlement. Come on, Loesberg and other victims of hedgerow envy: <em>encore un effort pour &#234;tre historiens</em>!</p></li><li><p>Richard Sha also wants to be me. At least he reworks bits of my prose into his own text, more as a series of in-jokes addressed to me, or so I presume, than as winks at the reader.<a href="#9">[9]</a><a name="back9"> </a> But he has a larger point to make: "alterity has become a post-modern version of objectivity. By that I mean that whereas under objectivity, historians could rely upon an historical object independent of the subject who wants it to become an historical object&#8212;a position that can now seem naive&#8212;our recent historicist self-consciousness that there are no innocent objects of historical inquiry has meant that alterity now takes on the possibility of distance between subject and historical object without bringing with it objectivity's naive baggage. Our alterities are calculated." That criticism seems to me to be very astute and far-reaching. It is quite canny of Sha to notice the way that the category of "alterity" can function in the history of sexuality as a badge of honor, a test of rigor, a guarantee of objectivity. So his criticism of the function of alterity seems well-founded. But I'm not sure it represents a valid criticism of me.</p></li><li><p>In fact, I should have thought that Sha, in framing his critique of the place of alterity in current histories of sexuality, would have numbered me among his allies instead of his targets. What I had singled out as "priggish" about "my [earlier] insistence on the alterity of the Greeks, about my [former] effort to get historians of sexuality to adhere unfailingly to neat, categorical, air-tight distinctions between ancient paederasty and modern homosexuality," after all, was precisely the tendency to dictate the proper uses of alterity, to identify a historian's dedication to alterity with objectivity, rigor, resistance to pleasure, and intellectual virtue (<i>How to do</i>, 14). When I called my earlier attitude "priggish," what I meant was that there was something excessively strict, doctrinaire, righteous, superior, even schoolmarmish about my desire to prescribe to students of the past what sort of pleasure they were entitled to find in the archive, and how they might connect pleasure with truth. In undertaking a public auto-critique, I intended to acknowledge that the history of sexuality allows for multiple sites of identification with the past, and that it is not the historian's job to decide whether others should get off by seeing themselves reflected in the surviving record of antiquity or by discovering strange and exotic historical creatures beyond the horizons of their own cultural imagination. I clearly stated my own preference for a historicist approach, and I also tried to specify the reasons as well as the personal (erotic, ethical) investments that lay behind that preference. But I also recognized, in the end, that "a historicist approach to sexuality needs to be argued for as a preference, not insisted upon as a truth" (23). So much, I would have thought, for alterity as objectivity. Sha quotes this last remark of mine, rather skeptically, but he discounts it, as if he thought I didn't really mean it.</p></li><li><p>To be sure, I do think there are some cognitive advantages for historical understanding in attending to and even emphasizing alterity. I don't deny that for a moment. But to speak of "cognitive advantages for historical understanding" is to open up the category of "historical understanding" to further negotiation and specification, to allow for an ongoing discussion of what constitutes such an understanding, what kind of understanding we seek when we undertake any particular project of historical analysis, how that work is carried out, within what sort of intellectual and political and institutional horizons it is inscribed, who wants it and for what reasons. My attachment to alterity therefore has little to do with a notion of historical objectivity as a kind of permanent court of last appeal sitting in perpetual session to judge the rightness or wrongness of historical statements. My own belief is that my pragmatist understanding of the value of alterity is consistent with my pragmatist notion of objectivity&#8212;with an alternative view of what constitutes objectivity within the realm of historical practice. Such a revisionist notion of objectivity is in any case far removed, I think, from Sha's somewhat punitive, positivistic understanding of "objectivity."</p></li><li><p>Sha writes, "Just as imposing our notions of sexuality onto the Greeks leads to blindnesses, so too does insisting that the Greeks were absolutely other." I agree. Did I not urge, after all, that "a sensitivity to difference should not lead to the ghettoization or exotification of the Other, to an othering of the Other as an embodiment of difference itself"? (17). I rather thought that by making an explicit defense of historicism; by stating my preference for an approach to the past that valued, without fixating singlemindedly on, its alterity; by articulating the reasons for my preference; and by emphasizing that preference <em>as</em> a preference&#8212;and not as a truth or a law or a method or a virtue or an imperative: I thought that by doing all those things I had opposed the very fetishizing of alterity of which Sha now accuses me. I don't maintain that the Greeks were "absolutely other." Indeed, my hermeneutic principles, which insist that any notion of alterity is inevitably determined by reference to the subject who constructs it and thus by reference to our present, forbid me to imagine, let alone to lobby for, any such transcendental object of historical knowledge and desire. Already in my 1990 book, <em>One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,</em> I inveighed against what I called "a kind of ethnocentrism in reverse, an insistence on the absolute otherness of the Greeks, . . . an ethnographic narcissism as old as Herodotus&#8212;a tendency to dwell only on those features of alien cultures that impress us as diverging in interesting ways from 'our own'" (60). And in <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em> I argued that we cannot reconstitute the otherness of the Greeks "by an insistent methodological suspension of modern categories, by an austerely historicist determination to identify and bracket our own ideological presuppositions so as to describe earlier phenomena in all their irreducible cultural specificity and time-bound purity" (107).</p></li><li><p>It is Sha who dreams of an otherness that would be really, truly, objectively Other:</p><blockquote>On the one hand, Halperin wants to think outside of our present concept of orientation. On the other hand, he makes orientation his vantage point for establishing the alterity of Ancient Greek sexuality. His choice of orientation as the vantage point for gauging the alterity of the Greeks has the unintended effect of anchoring modern sexual categories in the ontology of history. One could easily imagine other ways of thinking about alterity: for example, by examining how different cultures cope with the elasticity and excessiveness of desire, orientation thus becomes a strategy for dealing with&#8212;for tempering&#8212;the mobility of desire just as gender is one means of discouraging excess desire in Ancient Greece. Such a reimagining demands that we truly think outside of orientation by insisting upon its ideological work without running the danger of reifying orientation as a vantage point from which to gauge alterity.</blockquote></li><li><p>And so he is upset with me because he suspects that I may have palmed off on him an alterity that is not the genuine article. As the passage quoted above makes clear, he thinks he has caught my version of alterity in the act of smuggling in contemporary identities in the guise of otherness, just as he has caught me in the act of "anchoring modern sexual categories in the ontology of history" and "reifying orientation as a vantage point from which to gauge alterity." But I made no secret of it. That is exactly what I set out to do. There is no "unintended effect" here. My insistence on approaching the history of sexuality from within the cultural and sexual horizons of my own location is the very thing that safeguards the version of alterity I desire from ever being or claiming to be "absolutely other." Contrary to what Sha claims, I don't try, as a historian, to step out of my own world, to escape my own culture, and I don't dream of a "view from nowhere."<a href="#10">[10]</a><a name="back10"> </a> I am happy to inhabit the contradictions of my own existence.</p></li><li><p>In other words, Sha is quite right when he claims that I want both to think outside modern sexual categories and to acknowledge them as framing my historical inquiries&#8212;when he speaks of "Halperin's resistance to orientation, a resistance that simultaneously tries to step outside of it and to enshrine it as a vantage point." That is what I think historians of sexuality need to do. After all, to be a historian of sexuality is necessarily to inhabit multiple temporalities: as a sexual subject oneself, one is bound to contemporary sexuality in an instinctive and unarguable way, but as a historian one engages in the thought-experiment of living in a different world. To be a historian of sexuality is therefore to give oneself over to an endlessly stereoscopic sort of vision: it is to see the world simultaneously as it makes sense to oneself, at a very visceral level, and as it makes sense of the documented experiences of others. It is to recognize that modern sexual concepts compel belief with a force unlike that of any other philosophical concepts, while also recognizing that they do not determine the totality of one's cognition or prevent one from entering imaginatively into other people's experiences of desire and pleasure. The elusive but seductive goal of this intellectual <em>ascesis</em> is to turn us into anthropologists of our own culture and historians of our own present.</p></li><li><p>Now, no one said that any of this was going to be easy, that it would be free from contradiction and paradox, that it would produce some stable and lasting scholarly dispensation, that it would safeguard us from noxious effects and consequences, that it would place in our hands some surefire disciplinary method or set us on the royal road to historical objectivity. But that's precisely what makes it interesting&#8212;and, in my view at least, preferable to the alternatives.<br/></p></li></ol></div>
&#160;
<div class="notesWorks"><h4>Works Cited</h4><p class="hang" align="left">Crandall, Emma. "Do the Right Thing: Lesbian Honor, Butch Codes, and Historical Ethics. An Autobiographical Exercise in Futility." Unpublished.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Davidson, Arnold I. "Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought." <em>Foucault and the Writing of History</em>. Ed. Jan Goldstein. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994. 63-80, 266-71.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Elfenbein, Andrew. <em>Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role</em>. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Eribon, Didier. <em>R&eacute;flexions sur la question gay</em>. Paris: Fayard, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. <i>Insult and the Making of the Gay Self</i>. Trans. Michael Lucey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Halperin, David M. "Homosexuality&rsquo;s Closet." <em>Michigan Quarterly Review</em>, 41.1 (Winter 2002). 21-54.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. <em>One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and other essays on Greek Love</em>. New York: Routledge, 1990.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Hitchcock, Tim. <em>English Sexualities, 1700-1800</em>. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin&rsquo;s Press, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England." <em>History Workshop Journal</em>, 41 (1996). 73-90.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Jackson, Earl, Jr. Review of Richlin. <em>Bryn Mawr Classical Review</em>, 3 (1992). 387-96.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Miller, D. A. <em>Place for Us [Essay on the Broadway Musical]</em>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Nagel, Thomas. <em>The View from Nowhere</em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Richlin, Amy. <em>Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome</em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the &lsquo;Political Economy&rsquo; of Sex." <em>Toward an Anthropology of Women</em>. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. 157-210.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Traub, Valerie. <em>The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.</p></div>
<div class="notesWorks"><h4>Notes</h4><p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> See Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," and Traub, <em>The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England</em>.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> See, especially, "Homosexuality's Closet."<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> For a brilliant attempt to understand lesbianism as a cultural form in just these terms, see Crandall, "Do the Right Thing."<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Mudge might have acknowledged in this connection the work of Tim Hitchcock, particularly Hitchcock's "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England" and the introduction to his edited collection, <em>English Sexualities, 1700-1800</em>.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> Mudge writes: "Feminist commentators, on the other hand, read 'pornography' as the quintessence of patriarchal oppression, objecting to sexualized violence and demeaning stereotypes. Both groups [i.e., traditional historians and feminist critics] treat 'pornography' as a monolithic discourse, generally unspecified as to text or image and uniformly self-evident both in purpose and affect. Both assume that the word will remain a pejorative and that the category it names is transhistorical in nature. Thinking of 'pornography' first and foremost as an act of the imagination, however, allows for a better understanding of pornography's satiric entanglements within the larger cultural field, for a more nuanced reading of its textual or visual strategies, and for a greater appreciation of its historical development." Mudge might have included Richlin's <em>Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome</em> among his examples of this transhistorical tendency in feminist criticism: for a critique of that collection along precisely these lines, see the review by Jackson. Gayle Rubin demonstrated long ago, in "The Traffic in Women," that it is possible to treat forms of female oppression as both universal and constructed: the enduring nature of an oppressive structure therefore provides no justification for essentializing it.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> The third chapter of <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em> is entitled "Historicizing the Subject of Desire."<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> It is curious in this context that Loesberg doesn't refer the reader to some of the most important scholarship on the connections between Foucault's thinking about sexuality and his personal life: see especially Davidson, "Ethics as Ascetics," and the third part of Eribon, <em>R&#233;flexions sur la question gay</em>.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> See, for example, "Why is Diotima a Woman?" in <em>One Hundred Years of Homosexuality</em>, 113-151, 190-211.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup> For example, Sha's "acting like a tourist in the archive" echoes my "behaves, in effect, like tourists in the archives" (<em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em>, 60); similarly, his "One thing is for sure: the Greeks did not define their sexual differences to enable the 'disintegration of our own concepts'" echoes my "the one thing about the original spectators of the <em>Oedipus Rex</em> that we can be sure of is that they did not wonder what it was like to be the original spectators of the <em>Oedipus Rex</em>" (ibid., 21).<br/><a href="#back9">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup> Cf. Nagel, <em>The View from Nowhere</em>.<br/><a href="#back10">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><a name="bottom"> </a></p></div><div class="notesWorks"><p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> See Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," and Traub, <em>The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England</em>.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> See, especially, "Homosexuality's Closet."<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> For a brilliant attempt to understand lesbianism as a cultural form in just these terms, see Crandall, "Do the Right Thing."<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Mudge might have acknowledged in this connection the work of Tim Hitchcock, particularly Hitchcock's "Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England" and the introduction to his edited collection, <em>English Sexualities, 1700-1800</em>.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> Mudge writes: "Feminist commentators, on the other hand, read 'pornography' as the quintessence of patriarchal oppression, objecting to sexualized violence and demeaning stereotypes. Both groups [i.e., traditional historians and feminist critics] treat 'pornography' as a monolithic discourse, generally unspecified as to text or image and uniformly self-evident both in purpose and affect. Both assume that the word will remain a pejorative and that the category it names is transhistorical in nature. Thinking of 'pornography' first and foremost as an act of the imagination, however, allows for a better understanding of pornography's satiric entanglements within the larger cultural field, for a more nuanced reading of its textual or visual strategies, and for a greater appreciation of its historical development." Mudge might have included Richlin's <em>Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome</em> among his examples of this transhistorical tendency in feminist criticism: for a critique of that collection along precisely these lines, see the review by Jackson. Gayle Rubin demonstrated long ago, in "The Traffic in Women," that it is possible to treat forms of female oppression as both universal and constructed: the enduring nature of an oppressive structure therefore provides no justification for essentializing it.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> The third chapter of <em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em> is entitled "Historicizing the Subject of Desire."<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> It is curious in this context that Loesberg doesn't refer the reader to some of the most important scholarship on the connections between Foucault's thinking about sexuality and his personal life: see especially Davidson, "Ethics as Ascetics," and the third part of Eribon, <em>R&#233;flexions sur la question gay</em>.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> See, for example, "Why is Diotima a Woman?" in <em>One Hundred Years of Homosexuality</em>, 113-151, 190-211.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup> For example, Sha's "acting like a tourist in the archive" echoes my "behaves, in effect, like tourists in the archives" (<em>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</em>, 60); similarly, his "One thing is for sure: the Greeks did not define their sexual differences to enable the 'disintegration of our own concepts'" echoes my "the one thing about the original spectators of the <em>Oedipus Rex</em> that we can be sure of is that they did not wonder what it was like to be the original spectators of the <em>Oedipus Rex</em>" (ibid., 21).<br/><a href="#back9">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup> Cf. Nagel, <em>The View from Nowhere</em>.<br/><a href="#back10">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><a name="bottom"> </a></p></div></div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/halperin-david-m">Halperin, David M.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/503" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">desire</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/643" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">feminism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1990" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">history of sexuality</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/richard-sha" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Sha</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/bradford-keyes-mudge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bradford Keyes Mudge</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/valerie-traub" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Valerie Traub</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/susan-lanser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Lanser</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/gayle-rubin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gayle Rubin</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-loesberg" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan Loesberg</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/greece" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Greece</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/michigan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michigan</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:28 +0000rc-admin14939 at http://www.rc.umd.eduRomantic Loves: A Response to Historicizing Romantic Sexualityhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/elfenbein/elfenbein.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/index.html">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div id="container"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>Romantic Loves: A Response to <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i></h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">This essay responds to the essays in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_ by considering their usefulness in response to Michel Foucault. The author examines how each essay continues or complicates Foucault's ideas in _The History of Sexuality_. The author concludes by discussing the concept of love in Romanticism. This essay appears in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><ol><li><p>In Volume I of <i>The History of Sexuality</i>, Foucault argues that sex should be treated not as a matter of individual choice but as part of "the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure":</p><blockquote>The central issue . . . is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact," the way in which sex is "put into discourse." (11)</blockquote><p>The "central issue" here has nothing to do with how anyone had sex. Foucault agrees with the most startling statement in Percy Shelley's "Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love": "The act itself is nothing" (221). This is an odd dismissal. One might counter that the act is rather important, and deserves careful historical attention. Foucault, however, claims that "sex" is merely "an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality" (155). His larger point is to avoid the perceived trap of elevating sex to "the side of reality," while demoting sexuality merely to "confused ideas and illusions" (15).</p></li><li><p>Since Foucault sees little purpose in writing a history of sex acts, he is more concerned to counter the assumption that he will present a victorious history of sexual repression (bad) and sexual liberation (good). Such a history would beg the question he wishes to ask, which is how sex came to be understood as repressing or liberating at all. The important history of sexuality for Foucault lies not in the discourse itself so much as in the conditions that enabled it. What counts is not approving or disapproving of particular statements, but grasping the larger system that allowed sex to enter language at all: why sex was worth talking about, who talked about it, what institutions undergirded them, and how language about sex was recorded and disseminated. Foucault's position requires understanding language about sexuality only in relational terms, insofar as any given piece of discourse takes its place within a larger web of statements about sexuality.<a href="#1">[1]</a><a name="back1"> </a></p></li><li><p>For literary critics, this is hardly news: Foucault's arguments are nothing if not familiar. Yet the familiarity of his arguments at a theoretical level masks the difficulty that literary critics have had in actually carrying forward Foucault's project. For the most part, the essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> manifest a somewhat oblique relation to Foucault, despite the citation of his work. In part, as Jonathan Loesberg argues in his essay, this may have occurred because a rather minor part of <i>The History of Sexuality</i>, the supposed "invention" of the homosexual, has bulked so large in the reception of Foucault that it has come to stand for the whole. Engaging Foucault may not seem very interesting when, too often, it has come down to nothing more than agreeing or disagreeing with his dates.<a href="#2">[2]</a><a name="back2"> </a> Furthermore, for all of Foucault's supposed omnipresence, much of the historical spadework required to place literary works in relation to a larger discursive network about sexuality remains unfinished. Decades after the publication of Foucault's work, scholars of British studies have nothing like even a fragmentary account of factors that he suggests are central to a history of sexuality. We do have some pieces, such as examinations of developments in science and medicine, political rhetoric, and literature.<a href="#3">[3]</a><a name="back3"> </a> But other areas of potentially equal interest remain relatively untouched, such as the discourse of religion (sermons, tracts, biblical commentaries) or the codes of military conduct (the role of sexual humiliation in wartime, as at the siege of Badajoz during the Peninsular campaign). Nor has anyone put the pieces together to create even a tentative map of the deployment of sexuality across institutions, knowledges, and practices. The citation of Foucault's text has substituted for the realization of his project.</p></li><li><p>Beyond the daunting range of knowledge that would be required for a full Foucauldian analysis, disciplinary practices within literary criticism preserve many categories that Foucault wished to question. In particular, the genre of literary critical essay still bases itself primarily around the reading of individual texts, typically understood as the product of an intending author who has expressed himself or herself in them. It has proven much easier to criticize the assumptions of this mode than to provide workable alternatives to it. Essays or books that draw on historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic theories designed to unsettle the sovereignty of the intending author often do less to unsettle it than to find ways of coexisting uneasily and oxymoronically beside it.</p></li><li><p>For literary critics, the individualism of the artistic self privileged by the conventions of disciplinary analysis chimes with the individualism that, according to Foucault, is the triumph of sexuality's regime: "So it is that all the world's enigmas appear frivolous to us compared to this secret, minuscule in each of us, but of a density that makes it more serious than any other" (156). One result is that he cautions against thinking that "we are affirming the rights of our sex against all power" when we actually are only "fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep within us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected" (157). Although Foucault does not make the connection explicitly, one result of this individualism is that understanding ourselves in terms of a relational web of power becomes extremely difficult: the deployment of sexuality locates our identity entirely "in" us. Literary critics appropriate this individualism when they read texts as expressing, encoding, or repressing a sexualized self that belongs either to the biographical author or to the author as figure for a cultural moment.</p></li><li><p>The result tends to reinstall as givens the categories that Foucault unsettled. Close reading alone, no matter how historically situated, cannot describe just what kind of power literature <i>qua</i> literature had within the larger network of discourses that deployed sexuality during the Romantic period.<a href="#4">[4]</a><a name="back4"> </a> Unfortunately, Foucault's key concept for battling the individualizing power of sexuality, "power," is so all-encompassing that it offers only limited help. Foucauldian power is a site of "multiple and mobile . . . relations" (98) undergoing such constant transformation that they virtually defy analysis. It seems as if Foucault wants the sheer complexity of his image of power to be a guarantee of its truth.<a href="#5">[5]</a><a name="back5"> </a>Reading Foucault's description, it can feel as if his concept of power is less a blueprint meant to be realized in a concrete analysis than a point-by-point negation of an older, inadequate model.</p></li><li><p>The great value of the essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> is to provide some badly needed specificity about the forms of agency that sexuality might take during the Romantic period, as an alternative to Foucault's all-devouring "power." Even as Foucault insists on the omnipresence of power, he looks to the most obvious sites for its deployment, such as religious confession and the medicalization of sexuality. The essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> provide a much better guide to the multiplication of sexualities by looking at such sites as the preface, the novel, poetic form, an abolitionist tract, women's clothes, and juvenilia. In what follows, I treat the essays in <i>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</i> with an avowed bias: imagining how they might fit into a larger Foucauldian project by discussing the kinds of agency associated with each of these sites.</p></li><li><p>Bradford Mudge's essay examines "how sexual bodies are represented in romantic fiction" (8). After describing voyeurism in Cleland's <i>Fanny Hill</i>, he turns to Lewis's <i>The Monk</i>, in which voyeurism reveals not the "real" body as described by Cleland but the unobtainable body of male fantasy, and Austen's <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, in which bodily pleasure is made subservient to "love, marriage, and family." In linking his work to Foucault, Mudge notes that <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>foreshadows and encapsulates Foucault's "entire argument," because Foucault "insists" that sexuality "coheres in one central purpose"; this purpose, according to Foucault, is that of constituting "a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative." Yet Mudge seems more convinced of this point than Foucault does; immediately after the passage that Mudge quotes, Foucault writes, "I still do not know whether this is the ultimate objective" (37). Indeed, what Mudge claims to be Foucault's basic argument looks more like Foucault's self-parody of his own repressive hypothesis, which is why he quickly backtracks from it. In the larger context of <i>The History of Sexuality</i>, Foucault's argument is not that sexuality is politically conservative; indeed, he spends considerable time criticizing historiography that imagines power in terms of a one-sided hierarchy of oppression implied by a phrase like "politically conservative." Instead, he explains how modern discourses of sexuality work through "multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of 'perversities'" (37).</p></li><li><p>The relevance of Foucault for Mudge's argument is less that <i>The History of Sexuality</i> recapitulates Jane Austen but that Foucault specifies the question of how literature acted as a vehicle of multiplication: how did reading fictional stories about sex come to be as important as doing it? It is tempting for literary critics to conceive the answer chiefly in terms of representation: because novels depicted sexualized behavior, they were obviously an instrument shaping the deployment of sexuality. Yet Foucault suggests that an analysis of fiction's agency needs to do more, by engaging the dynamics of reception in terms of "the institutions which prompt people to speak about [sexuality] and which store and distribute the things that are said."</p></li><li><p>For scholars of the Romantic novel, answering this question might include examining the intersection between the social institution of the family and the economic apparatus of fiction marketing and production. The point is not simply that novels represented sexuality, but that the presence of novels changed in important ways the sexual dynamics of the family: novels invaded the household; defined, consolidated, or challenged relations between family members; marked living spaces as appropriate or inappropriate for reading; were kept, returned, or junked; and became subjects of conversation. The work of William St. Clair in <i>The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period</i> might provide a telling starting-place for a more complete investigation of the novel as a particular site for the multiplication of sexualities during this period.</p></li><li><p>The essays of Susan Lanser and Daniel O'Quinn foreground one of the most important forms of agency in the history of sexuality, the code. Foucault describes the code in terms of "the method of interpretation" central to <i>scientia sexualis</i>, in which "the revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said" (66). Sexuality is the hidden truth that can be made visible only with the help of the expert interpreter. With the right tools, even seemingly innocent texts can be made to confess, to yield up their secrets to decipherment.</p></li><li><p>In Lanser's essay, lesbianism is the mystery encoded by poetic form; the skilled interpreter is able to unwrap the mystery by close attention to "sapphic tropes": "The transgressive potential of female friendship . . . urged the inscription of female intimacies into the ambiguities of figuration." This essay's detailed foregrounding of figuration and metrics demonstrates that poetic language has resources available to it for encoding that are not available anywhere else. Lanser's essay valuably helps to explain some of literature's peculiar place in the deployment of sexuality because of its ability to install sexuality not only in semantic meaning but also in extrasemantic aspects of language.</p></li><li><p>For O'Quinn, decoding involves interpreting the competing pressures of abolitionist discourse between Christian masochism and the history of British imperialism. His essay looks closely at an odd scene of prayer in Olaudah Equiano's <i>Interesting Narrative</i>. The gap between what one might expect of such a scene and what Equiano provides leads O'Quinn to read the episode as a moment of Christianized masochism, in which Equiano "is . . . acting his sexual degradation." This abasement is "necessary for Equiano's masochistic identification with the invisible church," an identification that the essay develops by examining Equiano's reference to the "Sons of Belial" in terms of its Biblical source in Judges 19.</p></li><li><p>The major achievements of O'Quinn's essay lie in foregrounding abolition and the slave trade as critical sites for the deployment of sexuality during the Romantic period, and in emphasizing the role of Christian rhetoric in mediating this deployment. Moreover, O'Quinn importantly underscores the value of masochism in forging a nexus between Christianity, imperialism, and the slave trade. Yet the status of masochism fluctuates in the essay between a rhetoric of eighteenth-century dissent strategically deployed by Equiano and something closer to a psychological neurosis, as described by Reik and Silverman. The more that O'Quinn's essay moves toward decoding, the more masochism becomes the essence of Equiano's being, what Foucault describes as "a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage" (59).</p></li><li><p>For example, Equiano tells us that George "would get up on purpose to go to prayer with [him], without any other clothes than his shirt." O'Quinn's prioritization of masochism leads him to read this scene in terms of Equiano's sexual abasement, in which George serves as Equiano's "necessary tormentor." Yet positing masochism as the truth that must be extracted from this scene leads O'Quinn to sidestep the fact that Equiano's language does not obviously reveal masochistic torment. On the contrary, when Equiano describes George's enthusiasm for prayer, Equiano notes, in the passage quoted by O'Quinn, "I was well pleased at this, and took great delight in him, and used much supplication to God for his conversion." One might argue that such a statement is a reaction formation, a defense against desire, but doing so reinscribes the sexualized essence that Foucault wished to question. (O'Quinn argues for something like such a reaction formation later in his essay when he describes a "textual repression in which physical and quasi-anthropological observations are used to regulate the power of emotion elicited by rememorative passages that are too volatile to handle.") Yet Equiano's language focuses less on his sense of threat and powerlessness than on his somewhat condescending amusement at George's naivete and his pleasure at his own power over George, his ability to "make such progress with this youth." His ultimate failure to convert George may point less to his own need to sustain a masochistic fantasy than to his opportunity to provide a negative example to his audience; they should not be like the "sons of Belial" who ultimately prevent George's conversion, but should be among those who hear the word and bear a good harvest by abolishing the traffic in slaves.</p></li><li><p>Through their investment in decoding, Lanser and O'Quinn both raise questions about the temporality of this mode of agency. Did these figurations have to wait for twenty-first century critics to unlock their ambiguities, or were they available to Georgian readers as well? Both essays seem to assume that they were indeed decipherable to their original readers. If so, they might do more to explain the reading practices whereby readers would have been acclimated to look for sexualized codes, as in the reception of satire. More generally, these essays develop in a way that Foucault does not the effectiveness of the code as a site for the proliferation of sexuality, since codes, like allegories, have a tendency to overwhelm their boundaries. If poetic form is sometimes a code for irregular desires, is it all the time? Does this irregularity apply only to sapphic representations, or to ones between men as well? If Equiano is sometimes occupying the position of Christian masochist, is he doing so all the time? If not, how does one recognize the presence or absence of coded moments? As D. A. Miller has pondered, answering such questions is particularly difficult. Ignoring coded meanings condemns sexuality to invisibility, but searching for them can at times come close to a hostile interrogation, an outing of the text (17-18).</p></li><li><p>Whereas the essays by Lanser and O'Quinn focus on uncovering what the text encodes, those by Fay and Heydt-Stevenson examine more visible rebellions or challenges to a repressive order. In so doing, they seem to disagree strongly with Foucault, who claims that "sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely" (103). Both Fay and Heydt-Stevenson posit female sexuality as just such a stubborn drive, looking for modes of independence and self-expression in the face of restrictive social conditions and hostile censorship. According to Fay, Mary Robinson and Princess Caroline "felt empowered by the radicalism or laxity of their times to tease the borders of expected roles and rules engendering sexual expression"; according to Heydt-Stevenson, "Austen's representations of her heroines' fighting and drinking and lovemaking and thieving . . . offer a language for deciphering the robust, lusty female energy that social rules encrypt or entomb." They both reaffirm the rebellious woman of bourgeois feminist criticism, whose inherent intelligence and dynamism struggle against an oppressive, patriarchal environment.</p></li><li><p>Although these essays eschew Foucauldian positions, they both nevertheless raise important points for a Foucauldian analysis of the Romantic period, especially in relation to women. The association traced by Fay between clothes and female agency offers a telling contrast to what Foucault describes as the interpretive techniques of confession. Whereas some bodies need to be forced to disclose their sexual truths, others, such as those of Robinson and Princess Caroline, become all too easily legible, being reproduced with dizzying rapidity in written descriptions, prints, and satirical drawings. Her essay suggests that the Foucauldian category of <i>scientia sexualis</i> could be provocatively juxtaposed with a very different system of clothes and fashion as modes for producing the sexualized body. Whereas Foucault imagines a body of opinion generated by medical specialists, Fay describes a system created not merely by the British fashion industry, but also by pamphleteers, actors, cartoonists, and society painters. As Fay demonstrates, it is not enough to treat clothes simply as another item within a burgeoning consumer society: clothes had a privileged place within print capitalism's techniques of training the eye. Literary historians should have a particular interest in this use of clothes, given the parallels that historians have noted between the struggle to define literary property and the debates over the ownership of dress design.<a href="#6">[6]</a><a name="back6"> </a></p></li><li><p>Heydt-Stevenson's essay points to what Foucault calls "the tactical polyvalence of discourses" (100): the condescendingly repressive language of the late eighteenth-century conduct books gives rise to the "joyful lawlessness" of Austen's juvenilia. Moreover, Heydt-Stevenson importantly insists that the "abandon" of the juvenilia is not "entirely repressed" in Austen's more mature work. Her essay points to the need for further analysis of the work that the label "juvenilia" performs simultaneously to sexualize and desexualize the narrative of an authorial career. Since the time of Virgil's <i>Eclogues</i>, juvenilia have been associated both with displays of eroticism and with an immature stage of life that the author, thankfully, outgrows in order to engage more "serious" issues. Heydt-Stevenson powerfully demonstrates that the assumptions undergirding this developmental model need serious reconsideration.</p></li><li><p>Richard Sha's essay moves the ground of discussion from particular case studies to the larger theoretical underpinnings of the historiography of sexuality. His essay makes an important intervention not only into scholarship on the Romantic period but also into work on the history of sexuality more generally in its persistent querying of "alterity as the gold standard of history." He pursues this theme through a potent contrast between two thinkers, both "committed to the otherness of Greek sex," but for different reasons. David Halperin's discussion of the pseudo-Lucianic <i>Erotes</i> values alterity as a way of making us "think outside of our present concept of orientation"; Shelley's preface to his translation of <i>The Symposium</i>, according to Sha, uses alterity more conservatively to consign homoeroticism to the Greek past and thereby clear the way for a universally heterosexual modernity. Sha's criticism of the fetishization of alterity is a familiar theme in the history of hermeneutics; Paul Ricoeur, for example, describes the "illusion . . . that puts an end to our collusion with the past and creates a situation comparable to the objectivity of the natural sciences, on the grounds that a loss of familiarity is a break with the contingent" (74). Sha is particularly compelling in his demonstration of how the privileging of alterity encourages a sort of "lite" objectivity, a humanities-friendly version of the (supposed) factual certainty of science.</p></li><li><p>In the service of this objectivity, according to Sha, Halperin ends up portraying the Greeks as even more "other" than they were, at least on the evidence of the <i>Erotes</i>. The differences described by Halperin turn out to be ones of degree rather than kind, though, to be fair to Halperin, the crux of his argument is that difference existed at all. A further question about the <i>Erotes</i> might be not so much about difference as about about generalizability. Both Halperin and Sha suggest that the <i>Erotes</i> is a highly self-conscious dialogue, with two opposing points of view brought into exaggerated contrast. As Halperin writes, it might be thought of as a "passionate debate . . . between someone who eats nothing but vegetables and someone who eats nothing but meat" (99). Given this obvious rhetoricity, what kinds of conclusions can be made about differences either of degree or of kind in light of its questionable generalizability?</p></li><li><p>When Sha turns to Shelley, he reads the homophobia of the "Discourse" somewhat as O'Quinn reads Equiano's <i>Interesting Narrative</i>, partly as a deflection of sexual threat: "Shelley's sense of the otherness of the Greeks may well have deflected attention away from his own homosocial desires." According to Sha, Shelley blames the Greeks' homoeroticism on their degradation of women; since Shelley believes that modernity has improved women's condition, homosexuality should no longer exist. Yet, as Sha notes, this othering quickly breaks down, since Shelley both admits that "gender inequality has not been abolished" and employs essentializing rhetoric to suggest that homosexuality cannot be safely confined to the past.</p></li><li><p>Yet the psychologizing of male sexual threat in this essay, as in O'Quinn's essay, may sidestep some of the text's performative work. The <i>Discourse</i> introduces Shelley's translation of <i>The Symposium</i>, with its gorgeous, rhapsodic account of love between men. Shelley's concern in his preface seems to me to be less to confine homosexuality to the Greeks than to stave off his audience's potential rejection of the whole of <i>The Symposium</i> because of their assumed disgust with Greek homosexuality. Rather than confining homosexuality to the Greek past, Shelley makes an even more peculiar argument. He saves <i>The Symposium</i> for his audience by arguing that Greek homosexuality was not what his audience (at least some of them) might think it was: "I am persuaded that it was totally different from the ridiculous and disgusting conceptions which the vulgar have formed on the subject, at least except among the debased and abandoned of mankind" (222). Class respectability arrives to rescue the Greeks: nice Greek men really did not have anal sex with boys at all; only vulgar ones did, and only vulgar readers now would be crude enough to think otherwise. According to Shelley, respectable Greeks had such a ripe fantasy lives that they did not need penetration at all:</p><blockquote>If we consider the facility with which certain phenomena connected with sleep, at the age of puberty, associated themselves with those images which are the objects of our waking desires; and even that in some persons of an exalted state of sensibility that a similar process may take place in reverie, it will not be difficult to conceive the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions, when the sexual connection cannot exist, to be such as to preclude the necessity of so operose and diabolical a machination as that usually described. (222)</blockquote></li><li><p>Rather than having full-blown anal sex, which Shelley regards not only as "diabolical" but also as just too much trouble ("operose"), Greek men "of an exalted state of sensibility" would ejaculate as one of the "almost involuntary consequences" of being "in the society of a person of surpassing attractions." One might imagine that the sheer messiness of those involuntary consequences could be just as inconvenient as the "operose and diabolical . . . machination" that Shelley deplores, but he seems to imagine that waking wet dreams are essentially more pure because they are involuntary.</p></li><li><p>The othering in Shelley's preface is not between the Greeks and the moderns but between the exalted and the vulgar in both periods; exalted Greeks had waking wet dreams; debased ones had anal sex; exalted modern readers of the Greeks understand the real purity of the love praised in <i>The Symposium</i>; vulgar modern readers insist on a "vulgar imputation" (222) of sodomy. As Sha argues, Shelley's presentation of sexual differences throughout is characterized by a slippage between identity and difference. With regard to Greek love, the slippage centers around the concept of abandonment. On one hand, Shelley claims that if the Greeks had anal sex at all, it was performed only by the "abandoned of mankind." At the same time, he describes the exalted wet dreamers in similar terms: their ejaculations occur when the men are "in a state of abandonment," rather like Heydt-Stevenson's depiction of Austen's juvenilia. What differentiates the abandon of the vulgar from the abandon of the exalted? Shelley's essay reveals "abandon" to be a vexed node in the discourse of sexuality, simultaneously desired and feared.</p></li><li><p>Jonathan Loesberg's essay moves questions of identity and difference to larger issues of gay historiography, without particular reference to the Romantic period. Loesberg spends considerable time in his essay exploring what Ricoeur, after Gadamer, calls the "horizon" of historical understanding (74-75). He names his own variously as "inauthenticity" and "hedgerow envy" and opposes it to those of gay historians, as represented primarily by David Halperin. The concept of the "hedgerow" enables a policing of identity and difference: because Loesberg is not gay, he can claim to have a "non-historical stake in the meaning of a historical narrative." The product of this "non-historical stake" is the conclusion that, even though gay historians are almost guaranteed to get their Foucault wrong, one should not criticize them too much because realizing the "Enlightenment ideals" of Foucault's philosophy "far exceed[s] any details of historical inaccuracy or accidents of political implication." Loesberg uses the aegis of inauthenticity to criticize and not criticize gay historians at the same time. Yet I'm not sure that the concept escapes the condescension that Loesberg wishes to avoid, since the "hedgerow" metaphor still positions gay historians "over there," enmeshed in their naive political biases, while Loesberg is "over here," enjoying the pleasures not of truth but of aestheticized, paradoxical self-consciousness.</p></li><li><p>At the same time, I think that Loesberg is exactly right about oversimplifications of the Foucauldian project, such as the reduction of Foucault either to his biography or to certain quasi-historical positions taken in <i>The History of Sexuality</i>. Yet the alternative to seeing Foucault as a historian may not be to treat him as a classic philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose goals are "to think outside the limits of one's own presumptions." We hardly need Foucault to think outside the limits of our own presumptions: Newtonian physics or Christian ethics, among others, would serve equally well. Foucault's interest lies less in neo-Kantian self-distantiation than in a conceptual framework that allowed a particular topic, the discourse of sexuality, to emerge as fundamental for a knowledge of modernity.<a href="#7">[7]</a><a name="back7"> </a> Given Foucault's own interest in the structures that enable enunciations to gain power, the interest of this framework may reveal less about a philosophical or political project than an academic one: Foucault's work moved sexuality from a minor, virtually unspeakable subject within the humanities to a core concern.</p></li><li><p>By focusing on the aesthetic aspects of Foucault's project, Loesberg avoids the institutional ones. Questions of "hedgerow envy" or "inauthenticity" arise in the realm less of aesthetics and politics than of aesthetics and politics as realized in a particular site: the academy. Although, in <i>Saint Foucaul</i>t, Halperin argues for the importance of Foucault to contemporary gay activism, the activist scene may have shifted between the late 1980s AIDS activists mentioned by Halperin and current GLBT activists (15-18). Today, few GLBT books, articles, speeches, or websites designed for a nonacademic audience make substantive use of anything by Foucault. The meaningful site of Foucault's success and influence is an academic one. The relevant subject positions for Loesberg's analysis may be as much English professor versus English professor as gay versus straight. The important questions opened up by Loesberg's essay involve the convergence of Foucault's influence on the academy and the growth of "GLBT Studies," a discipline that takes Foucault's work as a founding text.The (mis)understandings of Foucault traced by Loesberg have less to do with the constraints of gay identity or politics than with the adaptation of Foucault's work by pre-existing disciplinary structures and practices in the service of creating an academic foothold where none had existed.</p></li><li><p>The question haunting me after I read these essays was whether or not the representation of the sexualized human body should be the only or even inevitable starting-point for a discussion of Romanticism and sexuality. As numerous historians and critics have suggested, the eighteenth century witnessed an increasing consolidation of heterosexual norms in literature, politics, social mores, conduct books, medicine, and so forth, all accompanied by increasing impatience with gender transgressions that could be linked to same-sex eroticism. By the Romantic period, those heterosexualizing energies had been successful&#8212;indeed, possibly too successful. Frederick Beaty's still valuable <i>Light from Heaven</i> details the almost overwhelming heterosexism in Romantic literature. Anna Clark's recent work, in <i>Scandal</i>, has demonstrated the saturation of the Georgian public sphere in heterosexuality; endless idealization of heterosexuality went hand in hand with a seemingly endless capacity to be scandalized. What Foucault describes as a proliferation of sexualities may have looked, at least for the Georgian period, more like a monotonous repetition of one sexuality in every nook and cranny of discourse.</p></li><li><p>In the face of the heterosexual onslaught, Romantic writers did not so much develop a counterdiscourse as explore possibilities lurking within an older discourse, one often overlooked by the historians of sexuality, including Foucault. This was the discourse of love.<a href="#8">[8]</a><a name="back8"> </a> In the Romantic period, sexualities consolidate, but loves proliferate:</p><blockquote>Eternity is in love with the productions of time. (Blake, plate 7, l. 10)<br/><br/>
I love to be reminded of the past, Edward&#8212;whether it be melancholy or gay, I love to recall it&#8212;and you will never offend me by talking of former times. (Austen 118).<br/><br/>
I love a public road: few sights there are / That please me more. (Wordsworth, <i>The Prelude</i>, 12.145-46)<br/><br/>
Here a vain love to passing flowers / Thou gav'st. (Hemans ll. 41-42)<br/><br/>
I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if possible, with still more womanish expressions. (Lamb 972)</blockquote></li><li><p>The Romantics, like earlier writers, continue to direct love at the usual suspects, like God, man, and nature; in addition, "love" could serve as a convenient euphemism for sex in the period. But I am interested in the other possibilities that love made available, especially the Romantic knack for directing love at more out of the way objects. Diedre Lynch, in "Wedded to Books: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists," has already provided an important discussion of perhaps the most important of these: books. My interest is in just what relations these loves have to the history of sexuality as described by Foucault.</p></li><li><p>When Blake claims that "Eternity is in love with the productions of time," one might, with enough ingenuity, imagine how this could be decoded as a moment in "the will to knowledge regarding sex" (65).Yet Blake's use of "love" here proves more cryptic than a Foucauldian reading suggests it should be. Just what kind of love does Eternity have for these productions, and what is the difference between being in love with "the productions" and being in love with "time" itself? Blake uses the metaphor of "love" more to deflect knowledge than to enhance or proliferate it.Rather than permitting "eternity" and the "productions of time" to enter omnipresent regimes of power and knowledge, the love between them seems to shelter them from those regimes, or at least locate them in a place in which those regimes are not especially relevant. Romantic writers are interested in exploring the possibility that love for the productions of time or for being reminded of the past or for old china may have nothing to do with sexuality because it belongs to an entirely different place within the human psyche. They reveal desires that are not so much asexual as extra-sexual, existing next to but not necessarily in cooperation with the networks of power so vividly described by Foucault.</p></li><li><p>These loves, which may have rebelled against the consolidation of heterosexuality, later became a template for the quirky, "abnormal" loves pathologized by the sexologists, in the activity that Foucault calls "a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure" (105). Designating such loves as "perverse" pulls them away from their own discursive context into the orbit of sexuality. At best, in a psychoanalytic scheme, they could be read as sublimation, which, according to Freud, "consists in the sexual trend abandoning its aim of obtaining a component or a reproductive pleasure and taking on another which is related genetically to the abandoned one but is itself no longer sexual and must be described as social" (345). Yet there is a fine line between sublimation and neurosis for Freud, especially in relation to artists: "It is well known, indeed, how often artists in particular suffer from a partial inhibition of their efficiency owing to neuroses. Their constitutions probably include a strong capacity for sublimation and a certain degree of laxity in the repressions which are decisive for a conflict" (376).</p></li><li><p>In this Freudian light, Wordsworth's praise of "little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love" appears merely as another episode in the vicissitudes of the libido ("Tintern Abbey" ll. 34-35). Useful as such a decoding might be to later readers, it seems important for Wordsworth in his historical moment to imagine his "acts . . . of love" as something else. At a moment when the public sphere was packed with big, loudly named, embarrassingly trumpeted acts of sexual love on the part of the Prince Regent and others, Wordsworth's poetry seems interested in continuing an entirely different sense of what love might look like. This moment is hardly politically neutral; one might wish to connect it, for example, to the Burkean politics of domesticity as described by Claudia Johnson (198-199). It is, however, a representation of desire that does not mesh obviously with the regimes traced by Foucault, and it is one that Romanticists might want to engage more systematically.</p></li><li><p>Sexuality in Romantic writers can often become formulaic, while love, especially love not directed at people, more fully retains the aura of what Kenneth Burke calls the "concealed offense" (51-60). Foucault's project of tracing the network of knowledge and power around sexuality remains incomplete for the Romantic period. But it may be equally important to acknowledge histories of desire that never quite became part of sexuality during the period. In light of the importance of love, it might be worth asking about the link between bibliomania, as described by Lynch, and the history of pornography, as described by Mudge, so as to examine how the allure of graphic sexual representation interweaves with love for the medium (suspicious books, hidden magazines, exclusive websites). If Sapphic love lurks in eroticized irregularities, as Lanser demonstrates, I am also struck by the association between sapphism during the period and certain marked enthusiasms, as in the gardening of the Ladies of Llangollen and the sculpture of Anne Damer. The erotics of Equiano's relations with others on his ship meshes with his love for the intricacies of navigation, both the literal navigation of the ship and the figurative navigation of the British commercial system. In the cases described by Fay, a love for clothes may not only heighten the sexual allure of bodies, but compete with it, and Heydt-Stevenson suggests that the appetites indulged in Austen's juvenilia may or may not be pure displacements of erotic energy. The presence of love further complicates the play of identity and difference described by Sha by underscoring the potential inadequacy of a history of sexuality that focuses too exclusively on what Shelley calls "the act." It also adds another facet to Loesberg's analysis by inviting us to consider the relationship between aesthetic self-distantiation and love for a particular thinker like Foucault, of the kind that Halperin champions in <i>Saint Foucault</i>. If we imagine love as something other than sexuality by other means, it may offer scholars the chance to return to a seemingly old topic with a new perspective on its agency.<br/></p></li></ol></div>
&#160;
<div class="notesWorks"><h4>Works Cited</h4><p class="hang">Anderson, Amanda. "Victorian Studies and the Two Modernities.&#8221; <i>Victorian Studies</i> 47 (2005): <span class="indent">195-203</span>.</p><p class="hang">Austen, Jane. <i>Sense and Sensibility</i>. Ed. Tony Tanner. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987.</p><p class="hang">Beaty, Frederick L. <i>Light from Heaven: Love in British Romantic Literature.</i> DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971.</p><p class="hang">Blake, William. <i>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.</i><i>The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake</i>. Ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. New York: Anchor Press, 1982.</p><p class="hang">Clark, Anna. <i>Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution.</i> Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004.</p><p class="hang">Fletcher, Anthony. <i>Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800</i>. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996.</p><p class="hang">Foucault, Michel. <i>The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language</i>. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993.</p><p class="hang">---. <i>The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction</i>, Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.</p><p class="hang">Freud, Sigmund. <i>Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis</i>. Trans. James Strachey. New York:&#160; Norton, 1966.</p><p class="hang">Greysmith, David. "Patterns, Piracy and Protection in the Textile Printing Industry, 1787-1850." <i>Textile History</i> 14 (1983): <span class="indent">165-94</span>.</p><p class="hang">Haggerty, George. <i>Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century.</i> New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999.</p><p class="hang">---. "Male Love and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century." <i>Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800</i>. Ed. Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.</p><p class="hang">Halperin, David. <i>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</i>. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002.</p><p class="hang">---. <i>Saint Foucault:&#160; Towards a Gay Hagiography.</i> New York:&#160; Oxford Univ. Press, 1995.</p><p class="hang">Hemans, Felicia. "The Grave of a Poetess." <i>Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials</i>. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000.</p><p class="hang">Hitchcock, Tim. <i>English Sexualities, 1700-1800.</i> New York: St. Martin's, 1997.</p><p class="hang">Johnson, Claudia L. <i>Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s.</i> Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995.</p><p class="hang">Kriegel, Lara. "Culture and the Copy: Calico, Capitalism, and Design Copyright in Early Victorian Britain." <i>Journal of British Studies</i> 43 (2004): <span class="indent">233-65</span>.</p><p class="hang">Lamb, Charles. "Old China." <i>The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume Two</i>. Ed. David Damrosch et al. New York: Longman, 1999.</p><p class="hang">Liu, Alan. "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail," <i>Representations</i> 32 (1990): <span class="indent">75-113</span>.</p><p class="hang">Lynch, Deidre. "Wedded to Books: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists." <i>Romantic Libraries</i>. Ed. Ina Ferris.&#160;<i>Romantic Circles Praxis Series</i>.&#160;February 2004.&#160; &lt;<a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/libraries/lynch/lynch.html" shape="rect">http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/libraries/lynch/lynch.html</a>&gt;.</p><p class="hang">Messer-Davidow, Ellen. <i>Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse</i>. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002.</p><p class="hang">Miller, D.A. <i>Bringing Out Roland Barthes.</i> Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992.</p><p class="hang">O'Quinn, Daniel. "Preface: Romanticism and Sexual Vice," <i>Nineteenth-Century Contexts</i> 27 (2005): <span class="indent">1-9</span>.</p><p class="hang">Porter, Roy, and Lesley Hall, <i>The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950.</i> New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.</p><p class="hang">Ricoeur, Paul. <i>Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences</i>. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981.</p><p class="hang">Sha, Richard. "Romanticism and the Sciences of Perversion." <i>Wordsworth Circle</i> 36 (2005): <span class="indent">43-48</span>.</p><p class="hang">---, ed. "Romanticism and Sexuality.&#8221; A special issue of <i>Romanticism on the Net</i> 23 (August 2001). &lt;<a href="http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n23/index.html" shape="rect">http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n23/index.html</a>&gt;.</p><p class="hang">Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love." <i>Shelley</i><i>'s Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy</i>. Ed. David Lee Clark. London: Fourth Estate, 1988.</p><p class="hang">St. Clair, William. <i>The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.</i> Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.</p><p class="hang">Wordsworth, William. "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." <i>Selected Poems and Prefaces</i>. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.</p><p class="hang">Wordsworth, William. <i>The Prelude (1805).</i><i>The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850</i>. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.<br/><br/></p></div><div class="notesWorks"><h4>Notes</h4><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> Foucault has a complex understanding of exactly what "statement" means; see <i>The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language</i>, pp. 106-17.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> See also David M. Halperin's criticism of this misreading of Foucault in <i>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</i>, pp. 26-32.<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> For a partial bibliography, see&#160;Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, Anthony Fletcher, Tim Hitchcock, Anna Clark, Richard Sha ("Romanticism and Sexuality&#8221; and "Romanticism and the Sciences of Perversion"), and Daniel O'Quinn.<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Compare Ellen Messer-Davidow's discussion of the constraints of literary studies on the development of feminist scholarship, pp.178-82.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> On this phenomenon in cultural criticism more generally, see Alan Liu.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> See Greysmith, and Kriegel.<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> See Amanda Anderson for an argument that Foucault's output is essentially divided between "the critique of bourgeois modernity&#8221; and "the shift to aesthetic modernity&#8221; (198).&#160; In these terms, Loesberg privileges the second at the expense of the first.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> On the importance of considering love in relation to the history of sexuality, see George Haggerty, <i>Men in Love</i>, pp. 18-20, and "Male Love and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century," pp. 70-81.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p></div></div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/elfenbein-andrew">Elfenbein, Andrew</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/653" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">homosexuality</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/michel-foucault" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Foucault</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1512" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">love</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1979" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The History of Sexuality</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/richard-sha" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Sha</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/bradford-keyes-mudge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bradford Keyes Mudge</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/david-m-halperin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David M. Halperin</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jane-austen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Austen</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/susan-lanser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Lanser</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-loesberg" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan Loesberg</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/minnesota" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Minnesota</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:26 +0000rc-admin14933 at http://www.rc.umd.eduThe Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5: Romanticism. Editor, Marshall Brownhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/cambridge-history-literary-criticism-volume-5-romanticism-editor-marshall-brown
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="caption" class="alignleft" width="239">The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5: Romanticism. Editor, Marshall Brown. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 493pp&gt;. £65.00 (Hdbk; ISBN: 0-521-30010-X).</div>
<h3>Reviewed by<br />
Andrew Elfenbein<br />
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities</h3>
<p>In an era of flashy titles accompanying thin books, <em>The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5: Romanticism</em> is seductively unseductive. Its stern cover radiates resistance to market pressures. Yet what the book lacks in flashiness it makes up for in uncompromisingly high scholarly standards and a commitment to the value of comparative intellectual history. Marshall Brown and Cambridge University Press are to be congratulated for investing in long-term interest rather than short-term trendiness. As Brown explains in the introduction, the volume was originally conceived as a joint project with Ernst Behler. Behler's death left Brown to carry out this history, and he has done an exceptional job in developing a volume of uniform excellence.</p>
<p>Each chapter, rather than being merely a close reading of a work or a meditation on a small debate, presents comprehensive views of developments in England and Germany, the two areas that receive the most emphasis in the volume. All chapters are unusually rich in bibliographical depth; a history of twentieth-century literary criticism unobtrusively partners the more overt history of early nineteenth-century literary criticism. It is hard to single out "bests" when quality is so high, but David Simpson's chapter on "Transcendental philosophy and Romantic criticism," evidently a late contribution to the volume, is dazzling. It seems impossible that anyone could explain Kant and the responses to him by Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel so clearly and with so fine a sense of nuance, yet Simpson pulls it off. I suspect that many romanticists will welcome such a friendly guide to the era's most daunting texts. Other illuminating chapters include Kurt Mueller-Vollmer's on language theory, Tilottama Rajan's on genre theory, Brown's on the theory of the novel, Jon Klancher's on the "crisis in the republic of letters," and Theresa M. Kelley's on women, gender, and literary criticism. But the book has no obviously weak chapters: all of them make valuable contributions.</p>
<p>As is appropriate, England and Germany dominate the volume, especially because most of the contributors understand "literary criticism" to be something closer to "literary theory." The practical criticism of reviews, editors, and casual correspondence, while not ignored, gets less space than the more formal aesthetic pronouncements of writers such as Immanuel Kant, William Wordsworth, and Friedrich Schiller. This preference shunts aside less traditionally established writers: except for de Staël, women writers are relegated mostly to Kelley's chapter, and the implicit aesthetics of literature by and for the working class has no place in the volume. However, more traditionally canonical writers receive splendid treatments, with Friedrich Schlegel emerging as the volume's unannounced hero; he appears so often that he needs a full page in the index. Without ever making the claim explicit, the volume presents a strong case for Schlegel as the energy center for innovative thought during the period. He surfaces under every significant topic, from the French Revolution to the transformation of rhetoric, from the impact of Shakespeare to the use of scientific models. For those whose background in romanticism has not included Schlegel, this collection would be an excellent introduction to him.</p>
<p>The fact that students of British literature may not know much about Schlegel points not only to the insularity of romantic studies as they have developed in recent decades, which this volume aims to counteract, but also to the frustrations of the literary relations between Germany and England during this period. Although extraordinary work was produced in both countries, the cross-fertilization between the two was never quite what it should have been. German romanticism presents the fascinating spectacle of writers steeped in eighteenth-century English literature taking its dominant ideas and motifs in directions they never could have gone in England. If only more English writers could have known about this work, rather than those "sickly and stupid German Tragedies" that Wordsworth hated. And if only early nineteenth-century German writers might have known not only the inevitable Byron and Scott but also Blake, Keats, or Austen. Their ideas and interests engage in a dialogue that only rarely rises to the level of influence or even confluence.</p>
<p>My only hesitation about this volume is that most of the contributors are more comfortable than I am with the genre of intellectual history. Philosophical prose deserves to be read as carefully as literature, and this would seem to be especially applicable for an era that was invested in elevating poetry to philosophy and criticism to creativity. Yet most of these essays prefer to map ideas than to scrutinize the texts of those ideas: although many writers note the self-conscious literariness of German romantic theory, this recognition might have played a larger role in their actual analyses. The exception is Tilottama Rajan on genre theory: it is telling that she quotes more from the authors that she discusses than virtually any other essayist in the volume. She notices not only the theories of the authors but also what she calls "the overdetermination of theory by practice" (239). Her essay argues that "the philosophical study of genre . . . eventually jeopardizes the philosophical project of unity and identity attributed to aesthetics by Szondi" (236), which results in "a system disseminated into everything it contains" (237).</p>
<p>Rajan's argument that Romantic efforts at systematization are always "overdetermined by the ramifications of their details" (237) contains an implicit recommendation for this volume's readers. Rarely does anyone read such collections cover to cover: readers usually go to the table to contents to find the topics that they care most about. Yet those who privilege the index over the table of contents might gain most from this book, because the system represented by the table of contents is a mirage. Beneath the apparent division into discrete topics are recurrent concerns with the thought of particular authors.</p>
<p>Often while reading the volume, I wanted to insert parenthetical cross-references to other essays in the volume. For example, when E. S. Shaffer mentions that "Kant's ideas were mediated during the 1790s for the wider literary community by Friedrich Schiller's important essays on the function of art" (141), I wanted to point readers back to David Simpson's discussion of just how complex this mediation was (81). When Jon Klancher notes that the "'old-hat Berlin Enlightenment' appeared masculinist" next to the "mixed-gender enclave" (310) at Jena, I wanted to make sure that readers saw Theresa Kelley's discussion of what this Jena enclave looked like for the women involved (23738). Someone reading David Simpson's chapter on the French Revolution who learned that Schiller's <em>On Naive and Sentimental Poetry</em> analyzes the turn to nature as a "refusal of complex (and inorganic) human community and a further stimulus to reflective self-absorption" (64-65) would profit from Simpson's later placement of this work as a critical response to Kant's <em>Critique of Judgement</em> (80), Helmut J. Schneider's discussion of it as a contribution to the "<em>querelle des anciens et des modernes</em>" (93), Rajan's defense of its seemingly simplistic terms as an important "<em>metacritical</em> tool that works in several registers" (232), and David Perkins's grouping of it with mostly English works that use the past to analyze the present (339).</p>
<p>In other words, readers should approach this magisterial work in a romantic spirit, breaking down its own systematization so that each individual insight is understood in light of a larger, never quite enunciated totality. Admittedly, such an approach may take more time than following the convenient chapter divisions. But it will ultimately offer the richest insights from a volume that provides such skilled accounts of the period's dense and provocative literary criticism.</p>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-volume-and-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Volume and Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/reviews-blog-categories/vol-5-no-1" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vol. 5 no. 1</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/elfenbein-andrew">Elfenbein, Andrew</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Reviews</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-wordsworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Wordsworth</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/ernst-behler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ernst Behler</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/friedrich-schiller" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Friedrich Schiller</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/marshall-brown" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Marshall Brown</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/david-simpson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">David Simpson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/andrew-elfenbein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Elfenbein</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jon-klancher" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jon Klancher</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/theresa-m-kelley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Theresa M. Kelley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/immanuel-kant" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Immanuel Kant</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/friedrich-schlegel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Friedrich Schlegel</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 07 Jan 2002 15:58:39 +0000Jeffrey N. Cox48225 at http://www.rc.umd.edu